S6 E8 - Laksh Raghavan – Seeing the Systems We Cannot See

In this episode, I have a conversation with Laksh Raghavan. We dive deep into the origins of cybernetics, second-order systems thinking, and why W. Edwards Deming's philosophy remains as relevant as ever in today's AI-driven world. Laksh, founder of Cybersyn Labs and a systems thinker specializing in cybersecurity and executive coaching, shares how cybernetics provides a powerful framework for understanding organizations, leadership, and digital transformation.

The conversation begins by tracing the roots of cybernetics through Norbert Wiener before moving into the groundbreaking work of Heinz von Foerster, whose concept of second-order cybernetics shifts the focus from simply observing systems to recognizing that the observer is part of the system. Laksh explains that every observation is shaped by our experiences, biases, and mental models, making objectivity impossible without acknowledging the observer. This perspective has profound implications for leadership, collaboration, and organizational decision-making.

We then explore how these ideas connect directly to Deming's System of Profound Knowledge. Organizations often struggle because leaders attempt to implement transformations, whether AI initiatives, DevOps, or cybersecurity programs, without understanding the human system that must adopt them. Rather than imposing top-down solutions, successful leaders cultivate conversations, seek diverse perspectives, and recognize that understanding emerges through interaction rather than command.

The discussion also examines why complexity cannot be managed through rigid control. Using examples from chaos engineering, biological evolution, and Heinz von Foerster's demonstrations of "order from noise," Laksh argues that experimentation, feedback, and variation are essential for innovation. These concepts naturally lead into Stafford Beer's management cybernetics and Ross Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, illustrating that organizations survive by increasing their capacity to respond to complexity rather than attempting to eliminate it.

Throughout the conversation, Deming's influence is unmistakable. Whether discussing going to the Gemba, embracing continual learning, or recognizing that organizational transformation begins with transformed leaders, Laksh reinforces that lasting change requires epistemic humility, the willingness to admit we may not fully understand the systems we lead. As AI reshapes every industry, the greatest opportunity lies not in adopting new technology, but in developing leaders capable of seeing organizations as living systems where learning, adaptation, and multiple perspectives create enduring success.

Ultimately, this episode reminds us that digital transformation is not primarily a technology challenge; it’s a systems challenge. By combining Deming's teachings with modern cybernetics, Laksh offers a compelling vision for building organizations that are more resilient, adaptive, and fundamentally human.

Laksh's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laraghavan/

Transcript

John Willis: , [00:00:00] so welcome back. Another, profound podcast, which I think by now most people realize have sometimes a lot to do with Deming, sometimes almost nothing to do with Deming, or you could argue everything has to do with Deming.

But I've got one of my... Well, I, you know, I, I say I have a lot of favorite guests, but, , Laksh, you are like, you, you are such an in-intellectually stimulating person to hang out with. I think I get more, , intellectual stimulation in our conversations, whether we're podcasting or just discussing in general.

You're just a wealth of knowledge. And I, and I'll shut up now, but I think what we talked about, which was I had done a podcast with Glenn Wilson. And me and you have done some podcasts in the past, and people who, you know, are familiar with our podcast, or you should go and listen to them. . But you know, Glenn Wilson is an interesting guy.

He became, has become a good friend of mine, , DevSecOps guy, but he got his, got his master's degree in, in what we could generally say cybernetics and, a big fan of cybernetics. So we went deep there, and then at the end of the podcast, I started asking questions about systems direct and [00:01:00] order.

And Glenn did a really good job, but you poked me and said, um... And you did a podcast with Glenn, so I'll put a link into that to, to follow up with him. Mm-hmm. But you poked me and said, "Hey, you know, you, we, we should do a podcast 'cause I can go a lot deeper on this, this conversation." And that, and, and lo and behold, I think we've been working on this for a couple of months, and we finally got together here.

But, , just quickly introduce yourself again and what you're up to, and then we can dive into a couple of questions about, what, where my framing is right now in cybernetics and where we wanna go. 

Laksh Raghavan: Awesome. John, first up, thank you so much for having me on. , You know, the feeling is mutual.

I learn a lot every time I chat with you, and you're just too kind, to have me as a guest. So I am the founder of Cybersyn Labs. The name itself, , deeply connected with the topic today. And I think I'm sure we'll talk about the word cyber as well. I'm, , an independent consultant, , focusing on [00:02:00] cybersecurity, , strategy and things like that.

And I also do a ton of coaching and mentoring to executives here in Silicon Valley and across the globe. And most importantly, I run a online community, where a lot of cybersecurity executives are together with systems thinkers, cyberneticians, complexity thinkers, and philosophers. So it's truly a multidisciplinary...

I would-- you know, I, I think it's the first multidisciplinary group for technologists. And, we actually explore some of the stuff that we're gonna discuss today and then, go into the details of how, you know, what are the implications on leadership, implications on software development, implications on software security and whatnot.

Take these fundamental ideas seriously and then apply them to our work. And so it's a community where we share these ideas. There's a bunch of books that you get when you become a member, and then you get access to my newsletter and premium content, things like that. [00:03:00] So it's a small but thriving community, very high-quality people and very high-quality conversations.

John Willis: Yeah, no, it's great. I, the-- yeah, I think, you've always sort of been spot on. I think we met originally through a conversation about Deming, right? Which is a good place to start any conversation, I think, in both of our books. Just to, to catch us up. Prior to me really going a lot deep on Deming's history and then a little on AI, I probably could have told you who Norbert Wiener was.

I probably could have faked, a quick overview of what cybernetics was. And then, you know, I did a little more research when I wrote my Deming book about Norbert Wiener and how how he was sort of intertwined with somewhat the Deming story. Although I couldn't find any evidence that they worked exactly together, even though they overlapped in the same, like Aberdeen.

They were both at Aberdeen, probably maybe around the same time. They both worked on some of the missile defense logistics and stuff like that, but the, the two concepts fit really well, and I talk about a cybernetic [00:04:00] feedback loop, and then again, a little more deeper.

And then when I got into, my AI book, my "Rebels of Reason" book, , I went a little deeper on Norbert Wiener himself, but that's sort of where I stop, right? You talk about somebody being a cyber technician or a cybernetician.

I don't like-- like that's not me. You know me, I'm more of the sort of jack of all trades, right? You know, I guess the first question I have is does, um, it sort of intertwine what you sort of you think cybernetics is in general, but then I think there's a arching question there is, does Wiener get enough credit, too much credit for cybernetics?

You talk about like the Macy and you-- and if you wanna add the conferences and stuff like that. It, you know, from my view- 

Laksh Raghavan: Mm-hmm ...

John Willis: it sounded like he maybe got all the credit, in sort of some versions of cybernetics where, you know, I, I don't know how accurate that is. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. I mean, p-personally, I'll just open by saying I'm not a historian like yourself, John, and I deeply [00:05:00] respect the amount of research that you do to fact-check certain things and whatnot.

, But I, , at least in my opinion, from what I've read, I think, , Norbert Wiener is rightly credited, , as, coining the term cybernetics. And, I think- We should go back to who actually brought the word cyber itself into mainstream consciousness, into popular culture. And I think it's William Gibson. William Gibson, I think back in a New York Times, interview, he get asked, "Hey, you coined the word cyberspace back in the early eighties. Are you sick of it?" And he said, "No, no, no," I, I, I think he, "I would terribly miss it if it went away." But then he... When asked about the derivation of the word, he rightly says, "Cyber is from the Greek word for navigator."

And so, , Kubernetes, like, I'm sure I'm bu-butchering the actual pronunciation, but I'm not talking [00:06:00] about the Kubernetes that Google, you know, came out with. That's not it. 

John Willis: Right. Right. 

Laksh Raghavan: But it kind of goes back to that Greek word from where cybernetics evolved. And, , I think, g-gubernator, governor, is also a word of the same origin.

And so you can see the connection between that and what the word actually implies. And it really, you know, it, it's better explained as the steersman of a boat, right? The person, you know, at the tiller of a boat who's steering. And so obviously, you set a target, and then you wanna steer the boat towards that target, but you're never gonna get it right the first time because there's waves and there's wind.

And so again, so you see that, and then you error-correct, and then you error-correct. And so that continuous steering, is what is cybernetics. And it is, , it can be in simple terms said as the science of steering. But I think Wiener himself gave a very, you know, long, explanation, science of control and [00:07:00] communication and feedback in animals and the machines.

And so I, I... Something like that. And so it, it really boils down to, the science of steering. But when you go to second-order cybernetics, I think, we have to look at, you know, there's multiple definitions and descriptions of cybernetics because he, you know, he's not the only one. Ross Ashby wrote a book called Introduction to Cybernetics, and he's contributed heavily to the field.

And of course, there are many people who follow from there. But second-order cybernetics was originated by Heinz von Foister. And from that lens, I think an explanation of cybernetics, which is pertinent to the conversation here, is study of observed systems. What you're looking at as if there is a looking glass and you're kind of peering through the glass as, you know, as a neutral observer outside the system, and then you're looking at things and, you know, you're talking about its behavior and, and things like...

That's what [00:08:00] first-order cybernetics is all about. But second-order cybernetics is when the observer realizes that they are not outside the system, but they are part of the system. , And so from that lens, second-order cybernetics is the study of observing systems, us humans. 

John Willis: , So I, I, you know, I told you I, I've been trying to write a book about the history of quantum computing, and as I was thinking about, you know, in review for this call and I definitely have quantum on the brain.

You'll have to shut me off at some point. But it seems almost like first-- and this is, this is a loose, loose metaphor, but, but, like, first order is sort of like Newtonian in a sense, assuming that the observer doesn't have an effect on- 

Laksh Raghavan: Mm-hmm ... 

John Willis: on the sort of the, whatever , the observation is, I guess.

Whereas the second order sounds more quantum in that the- 

Laksh Raghavan: Mm-hmm ... 

John Willis: you can't untangle, you know, the Schrödinger's cat- Yeah ... version of, of cybernetics is that- 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. E-e-even though [00:09:00] metaphorically it is very appealing and very similar, I think there is nuance, , i-i-in it. , But I think that's a completely different conversation because this position that you arrive to where there is the observer effect is only when you come through the Copenhagen interpretation.

John Willis: Oh, yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: If there's an observer. Right. I'm a big fan of the Everettian explanation, but I don't wanna, you know, diverge the conversation. But I'll get to the essence of your question and try to answer that. I think the better explanation here or the better, insight from second-order cy-cybernetics, like when it comes to including the observer, is the famous, , Heinz von Foerster's quote, which is, "Objectivity is the delusion that observation can be made without an observer."

All observations require an observer, and each observer, is different. And so you can imagine, in an [00:10:00] organizational setting, the same event will transpire or the same announcement will be made by the CEO, and the marketing department will perceive it completely differently. And, you know, even individuals within the marketing department may, you know, perceive it differently.

And, and sales would perceive it differently, engineering perceive... And so we as observers, there is no observation that we make that is completely neutral. 

John Willis: Okay. 

Laksh Raghavan: Our history, our beliefs, our biases, our own personal experiences of the past is what was used to build our model of the world. And so all we bring to bear all of that every time we make an observation.

And so, calling it a bias is, you know, it's just your perspective of what's going on. And so I, I think that's where we have to have a much more pluralistic view of what is going on within an organization, where you invite other people into the [00:11:00] conversations so that we can figure out win-win-win situations.

John Willis: Yeah, I think that, leads into sort of collaboration, right, in general, right? Mm-hmm. Like, in other words, you know, that, and that, that breaks into consensus. I guess, uh, just to harp on the... I, I don't know all the interpretations. I know a couple of the interpretations of the quantum, but I think all of them would agree that observation is, definitely affects the observing experiment, right?

In other words, whether it's Copenhagen or many worlds or, I mean, they're all... but we, we can't divorce- Yeah ... observation. , And I guess that almost says that, and I'm, I'm diving too deep, that first order is almost, you know, archaically Newtonian in that if you're not including the observer.

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. I think the-- There's a very interesting, story that Heinz von Foerster, recollects. He's a very good storyteller and a raconteur, and I'm, probably not gonna do justice, but it's actually the, the story of Pavlov's [00:12:00] dogs. Uh, you remember-- I'm sure you remember the story of Pavlovian response and his dogs, and he actually won a Nobel Prize.

And, uh, his work was on conditioned reflex. You bring a dog, you ring a bell, you show the meat, the dog salivates. Repeat that, and then, finally, the, the lab assistant or the volunteer rings the bell but does not show the meat but, and yet the dog salivates. Right. 

John Willis: Right. 

Laksh Raghavan: And Heinz von Foerster goes on to explain, , later, a couple of years later, there was a Polish guy called Kornowski Who said, "Okay, I'm gonna repeat Pavlov's experiment," because he was-- he kept meticulous records of, you know, of any experiment in psychology for, you know, at that time.

And so he said, "Okay, I'm gonna bring the same breed of dog, you know, the same age. Uh, I'm gonna place it in the same size room with a window and forty-five degree angle to the table." You know, he kept e-e-exact notes, and so he repeated everything. And he [00:13:00] had an... He hired an assistant who would come and do the clapping of the bell every day.

But he, you know, he was very, very tricky in the sense what he did was one fine day of that experiment, series of experiments, where the dog has been conditioned- 

John Willis: Right ... 

Laksh Raghavan: he removed the clapper of the bell without the knowledge of the, the lab assistant. 

John Willis: Okay. Ah. 

Laksh Raghavan: and so there was no sound, and yet the dog- Yeah

salivated. And so, Heinz von Foerster says, you know, the Pavlovian effect was for, was for Pavlov, you know, the ringing of the bell was stimulus for Pavlov, but he didn't get the 

John Willis: dopamine. Yeah, yeah. That's funny. I-I-I- 

Laksh Raghavan: Right? Yeah, yeah. And so, and so he, he wrote the entire thesis, uh, and got a Nobel Prize thinking that it was the sound, but just the mere shaking of the- Yeah, 

John Willis: yeah.

Yeah, yeah 

Laksh Raghavan: Right? So if you remove the observer from the so-called objective science, you can, it's like, you know, doing science without understanding the philosophy of science. Without [00:14:00] observer, it, it can become very, very, very detrimental, uh, to the society. 

John Willis: Yeah, yeah. You know, , the monkeys in the cage with the, the bananas on the ladder, right? Like, I don't know if that ever really was an experiment, but, you know, where they, they literally put a bunch of monkeys in a cage, and then they, they put bananas on the top of the ladder, and then- 

Laksh Raghavan: Mm-hmm ... 

John Willis: the, they spray with a hose, a fire hose.

I'm sure it's more of a thought experiment, but I don't know. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. 

John Willis: Uh, 'cause it's kinda cruel, and they knock them off, and then they, they do this over and over. They then put in a new monkey. That new mon-- All the other monkeys are sort of trained not to do it. The new monkey- Mm ... goes up and, and, um, tries to climb and gets sprayed, and all the other monkeys know that it's gonna happen, and it just goes on until at some point, none of the original monkeys are in the cage, and- Mm-hmm

they're all monkeys that have never been sprayed. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. 

John Willis: Yeah. And they won't, they won't climb up the ladder to get the, the bananas. I guess, like, 12 monkeys or some crazy thing like that. , But yeah. All right. So the, so let's then, I [00:15:00] guess, to me, you know, it seems like as a sort of cut to the chase kinda guy, like, the second order is probably where, you know, we probably should focus on and, and it sounds like, uh, Foerster is the guy here, right?

Like, can you tell me more about him

Laksh Raghavan: yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I think Heinz von Foerster is the originator of second-order cybernetics. And, , you've studied a lot of, uh, World War, two history, so I think you may resonate well. Like, I think in my opinion, you remember how Feynman was kind of the, the trickster and the prankster, when they were discovering the a- the, the atom bomb.

He would go around doing all kinds of pranks. I think I kind of imagine Heinz von Foerster, being that guy at the, with, the giants of the field, , that he worked with, including Wiener and, uh, von Neumann was there, uh, Short Shannon was there. Plus, like, Claude Shannon, uh, was there. [00:16:00] And so, let me, talk a little bit about, Heinz's history itself.

So Heinz, was from Vienna and,, Vienna-- this was back in the nineteen eleven, nineteen-tens, and Vienna was very, very, uh, very much the center of, art and intellectual. A lot of things were happening at that time. And as it turns out, , Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, was a, was sort of a family, connection through his mother's side, if I remember correctly, kind of his uncle.

And he, Heinz grew up reading and memorizing Ludwig Wittgenstein's work. And, you know, you can kind of make the connections very clearly if you read about, Wittgenstein's works and Heinz von Foerster's works very much. They kind of... You can see how they align. Like, for example, Wittgenstein would say, "Ethics [00:17:00] cannot be articulated."

Like, morality is something you can say, "Hey, don't do that. Uh, thou shall not do that." Right. But ethics is I shall not. It's inward-facing. Morality is outward-facing. Ah. And so you cannot really articulate ethics. You have to act it. Yeah. And so Heinz von Foerster has this, uh, quote where, you know, he says, "If you want to see, learn how to act."

And so, back to his origins. And so he did-- You know, he was heavily influenced by, by Wittgenstein, and, , he was a magician. And I think that really helps because if you have to, if you have to be a good magician, you have to be a good student of the observer- 

John Willis: Yeah ... 

Laksh Raghavan: of how people, you know, form images or come to conclusions just based on appearances and how you can manipulate The attention, and when you manipulate the attention, you can manipulate what they actually perceive.

And, that truly builds up to, to his later [00:18:00] works. And so he's kind of this, physicist, uh, magician type of, of a person. And he, you know, eventually immigrates to the US and, gets introduced to Warren McCulloch, which I think you've written about extensively in your, in your books as well, right?

John Willis: Yeah. No, but McCulloch and Pitts are the- Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah ... 

John Willis: two of the most fascinating, at least in the AI history, that, that are, like, they're bar none, they're the two most interesting people in the history of AI, in my opinion. And McCulloch is- Yeah. Pitts is incredibly interesting, but McCulloch is, is, you know, probably underrated in the McCulloch-Pitts story.

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. He's one of the early giants in, in cybernetics, along with what Neumann, Wiener, Mead. And so w- you know, Heins von Foerster, \ moves to the US without properly knowing English. And, uh, he gets to the Macy conferences, and he gets [00:19:00] appointed, to basically be the editor to compile all the papers.

And so that's how you learn English, right? You actually- Yeah. Yeah. Totally ... have to solve this problem. And so they knew that, he doesn't know English, and they purposefully, you know, they purposely gave him that work. And so he learned English, and he got really, really good , at English and, and telling stories.

And he was observing, you know, obviously, uh, the growth of cybernetics, and he noticed that what was really missing... And by the way, I don't think he claimed any originality of this work because this can go back to a lot of deeper philosophies. I can go back to the Hindu idea of Maya, where, uh, the world is our construction, right?

Where- Colors and sounds don't actually exist in nature. They are pure constructions of our brain, right? And , the role of the observer and how we construct our reality becomes very, very [00:20:00] important. And so I think, I would say, Foerster actually took those old fundamental ideas to the-- and, and converted them to twentieth century, twenty-first century, uh, something that we can understand and, uh, connect to, resonate with, and so that we can act accordingly.

And so these are really old ideas packaged for this generation. And so the ro-- the importance of the role of the observer. And so that's how he came up with cybernetics of cybernetics, and he eventually became called as the Socrates of cybernetics because, you know, what, what he taught, he taught through provocation, paradox, rather than dogma and, and just telling.

And so a lot... He had a gift for storytelling and aphorisms, and there's tons and tons of quotes that-- of him that once you get it, it's, it's profoundly insightful, and I keep repeating them. Even though I get negative feedback, I... There are [00:21:00] some quotes that I keep repeating in, in my, posts because they are so insightful and apply to many, many contexts in life.

John Willis: It is amazing how the storytellers, you know... It actually shouldn't be too amazing, the sort of Churchill quote, right? But the storytellers seem to always be the ones, right? Like, they have to be-- Like, McCullough was apparently an amazing s-- I mean, I've seen some of his videos of storytellers.

He's-- But people who talked about him talked about he would just open up a room, you know, just his stories, and people would wanna hear the stories. I, I think- Yeah. You know, people say Deming gets maybe sometimes too much credit, but he gets the credit because he tells the stories, right? Mm-hmm. Like, 

Laksh Raghavan: he, 

John Willis: he told way better stories about Shewhart's work than Shewhart did, right?

It is always amazing that the storytellers sort of, you know... Again, they have to have the goods. You know, those three that I just mentioned are all, you know- Yeah ...pretty, pretty powerful, intellects in their own right, but the, the ability to tell stories is, is just such an important factor. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. I think [00:22:00] stories are amazing containers of insights that stands the test of time.

Yeah right? So y- But just that Pavlovian story- Right ...for the dog. 

John Willis: Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: That story is enough to explain what's fundamentally wrong in mainstream science today because we have completely ignored the role of the observer. What's fundamentally wrong with mainstream management, we have completely ignored the role of the observer and the biases that the executive brings into the organization and, and so on.

So, you know, different walks of life. 

John Willis: I'll squeeze this in right now. One of the things, you know, I kinda have three jobs. I, I feel like the universe is demanding me to retire, and I keep saying, "No, I'm not ready." But, yeah, I'm just not going out and looking for work as much.

And, part of it is I, I'm in falling into this trap of being sixty-seven years old. But to the extent that I do have a day job, I think a lot about what's wrong with AI, right? And I think this is gonna fit really well, is that I think, and to the point that you just made, the Pavilion story is a [00:23:00] good, good example, I think what I say right now is the disconnect or the gap between what an organization or a C-level thinks is their AI strategy- 

Laksh Raghavan: Mm-hmm ... 

John Willis: and what their actual talent system is. Not talent, and I know you get that. It's the talent system, right? In other words- Can you 

Laksh Raghavan: say, can you say more about 

John Willis: what you mean by that?

Yeah. I think the talent system is really the cybernetics. It's the systems thinking approach. It's the system of the talent. You know, the, the, you know... I mean, you could e- you could even almost better describe it as a soc- so-social technical system, right? 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. Yeah. 

John Willis: In other words- Yeah. And, and the fact that leaders are saying, "You know, we gotta do this with AI," and all that, and they sort of blast that out- Yeah

without even understanding, like, what is the talent system is part of... You know, and to keep a talent system simple, I would say, you know, I like to keep things simple, right? There's three groups. Of course, there's way more than three groups. But the one group is the sort of passive-aggressive, "Sure, I'm, I'm [00:24:00] ready."

And they have no interest in AI. They don't think it works. They don't believe it works. They have an anti-incentive for it to work. Mm. Then you got the sort of far-right group who's like, "Hey, it's working for me, and I'm, you know, the hero." The, you know, the do now, ask forgiveness later. And then you have the 

Laksh Raghavan: middle 

John Willis: group- The top enforcer.

Yeah. Yeah. And the, the middle group who are, like, the people that wanna do the right thing. They wake up in the morning, they come to work to do the right thing, but they don't have clarity. 

Laksh Raghavan: Mm. 

John Willis: And so when you're sitting up here with a talent, you know, with a AI strategy and saying, "This is what we do," and you have no strategy to figure out what does your talent system look like- 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah

John Willis: like, There's a complete... I mean, we know that's, you know, that... And that's not just AI. That's really any You know, sort of new, , technological strategy or a new social or technical strategy. Does that make sense? 

Laksh Raghavan: A-a-absolutely., Steve Jobs' old, , saying about product development comes to mind.

He talks about how, hey, [00:25:00] you first think through the customer experience- 

John Willis: Right ... 

Laksh Raghavan: and then work backwards to what pieces of technology do you need. And, uh, an executive who has no clue how product development actually happens, what the lived experience of a developer, of an engineer, of a salesperson, what, what it, what it is, they have no they have no clue.

John Willis: Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: And they can... All they can do is try to impose different tools. AI is just the, the, the new thing that we're talking about. In the past, it was imposing a new tool or a new process or whatever it is through forced top-down thing. Like, we know how those things go, and AI is gonna be no different.

John Willis: Yeah. And I guess does that-- that ties in a little bit to the sort of second order cybernetics in that, like if you're not taking into account the, the, the full extent of the observation or the observer of the system, and then that's why, like I know we're gonna get into probably another podcast, the [00:26:00] second order cybernetics and, and how it works with management, but- 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah

John Willis: the missing piece is the leadership thinks that... Or, uh, literally don't even r- they don't even realize they're literally looking through a glass pane, a clean pane of glass- 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah ... 

John Willis: trying to understand how they're gonna improve their organization.

Laksh Raghavan: [00:00:00] Yes. And you're right, John. I think management cybernetics is a, is an ocean in itself. Ah, yeah. And I think we should talk about management cybernetics and its originator, Stafford Beer, probably in a different conversation. But I'll answer your question around this. I think the the, the key insight here is that we do not see that we do not see.

John Willis: Ah. Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: We actually... Our eyes have a physical blind spot. 

John Willis: Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: And,

John Willis: yeah. Go a little more deeper into it. This one was fascinating. You brought this up in, in the blind spot idea. But blind spot in general is a great conversation, but like you said, there were some physical limitations to humans.

Laksh Raghavan: Yes. Because we talk about intelligent design but people who s- who study camera systems for a living would say, whoever designed the human eye will get fired if, you know- Or would never get hired in Nikon or Canon because the optical sensors, our [00:01:00] retina, and the electrical, the wires for the that picks up those photons to electricity conversion our optic nerve actually is in the front.

It kinda goes through the middle. And so there's a physical blind spot in our eye but we never actually realize that because the, the brain paints over that blind spot. And so we never realize that since we have two eyes and then we constantly shake them. So we're able to maintain a stable version of our reality outside of us.

But the key insight there is just if that is true for the physical world, think about the social realm where, every observer in an organization or even a society, we are autonomous, purposeful agents, and we create our own purpose and meaning, and we're all influenced by our own personal experiences and histories and whatnot.

And If a leader does not understand the different-- that there can be different [00:02:00] perspectives of the same problem. If you-- we should go back to Russell Ackoff's quote about the adjective in front of the word problem says nothing about the problem. It only says something about the person saying it.

And so a chief executive- 

John Willis: That's awesome. Yeah, you said 

Laksh Raghavan: it. 

John Willis: That's so awesome. Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: The-- a chief executive of course, the VP of cybersecurity is gonna bring you cybersecurity problems. Of course, the developer productivity VP is gonna bring you developer productivity problems. Yeah. Of course.

And so a leader then has to figure out, okay, if problems are abstractions of, I think Ackoff's technical term is mess, of what's actually going on. 

John Willis: Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: If that is a small abstraction of a perspective from that specific VP, then to figure out what is actually going on, to have that conversation and to bring people's perspectives together is key to success, right?

Otherwise, people are gonna stay probably in [00:03:00] their own perspectives, staying true to their own incentives. Of course, that then takes a lot more change in how we perceive humans as purposeful, individual, autonomous agents that need the full autonomy and freedom to actually do, go do creative work.

But also see that, oh, we're all-- we all have different perspectives, and we have to come together, and it involves a lot of storytelling and conversations and whatnot. 

John Willis: Yeah. No, it makes you think, you know what? It's easy to criticize leadership, right? Oh, leaders are terrible, and this is what, it's the same sorta cop-out that we give to the, the leaders give to their employees. "Oh, the employees, they just don't wanna change." And they're like, and it's never that simple. But it really does like highlight, like how unique great leaders are. Because if you, like in your explanation, they have to sit there and decipher, not only be able to figure out like the, the cyber problem description, the developer problem description, the marketing problem, [00:04:00] and put all that together and and be able to unglue- All those ob-observer effects, yeah. And then put it together. It-- so it is a miracle that we actually have great leaders periodically. 

Laksh Raghavan: It... And it's not something the leader does sitting alone in a room. 

John Willis: Yeah, of course. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. It is something that they do through conversations and storytelling. A lot of conversations with different people together.

And really, we co-create the future, and it never happens by sitting in a boardroom, just talking to a handful of people. It involves cutting across layers and going to the Gemba, the proverbial Gemba where the work happens and building different perspectives and listening to people.

And so it's a lot of work that today's executives they're not used to that type of leadership. 

John Willis: Yeah. And they've been trained historically, at least in Western, in Western management philosophy, in all the wrong ways to actually better- Oh, 

Laksh Raghavan: yeah. The very idea of an MBA- 

John Willis: Yeah

Laksh Raghavan: is [00:05:00] that if you learn how to manage spreadsheets, you can manage any business, whether it's building airplanes or building a payment platform. Yeah. 

John Willis: Yeah, that's, And the-- I guess the other thing too, as I think this through, and you know me, I'll just throw stuff out there, but, I, and I go to my brick and mortar, right?

My brick and mortar is empathy, and like- ... having a, I, one of your sort of quotes is epistemic humility, right? I still think that's one of my favorite expressions of anything related to these kind of conversations. And I think, the importance of being able to, for-- in every aspect of life, but certainly in, in an organizational structure, is to be able to step outside and look at things from alternative views.

And it's- Yeah ... so hard. It's so hard because you're breaking your own chemistry really, right? What was it? Chris Argyris, right? The ladder of inference. He talked about- Yeah ... reflective loop and how do you force yourself to break out of what, what is Pavlovian, if you will, right?

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah we're, we are conditioned by our past [00:06:00] experiences, and it takes a lot of self-reflection to throw out some of these old mistaken ideas root and branch.

It's very difficult because the more it is intertwined with your own identity- Absolutely ... those are the ideas that are hard to, if they are wrong, to detect even and forget about error correcting.

And so it defines, your, if your identity as a leader is being that six-foot-tall, white male shouting orders and that's given you success in the past be-because, we're all fooled by randomness.

You're gonna go and try and repeat that in another company, right? And the more these ideas are intertwined with your identity, it's gonna be very hard for those leaders to become humble that, "Oh, yeah, I could be wrong. The ideas that I hold so dear to my heart about fundamental human nature," they may think that vast majority of the employees are just dead weight and they are cheaters, [00:07:00] and we need heavy pros-- approvals and monitoring and controls and and, when they see a company like Netflix, which does completely op-opposite things, it's it's, they don't understand it.

They they just dismiss it that, it's 

John Willis: like- They think that's chaos and it's-- they think that's the form of luck. 

Laksh Raghavan: Or it's just PR narrative or whatever, right? Or they're 

John Willis: the ones that are just in statistically lucky, not themselves, right?

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. 

John Willis: Yeah, I always think that we did that me and Gene did a thing with Dr.

Cook Dr. Spear, and Sidney Decker, and I guess Dr. Decker. I always call him S-Sidney Decker, and I call everybody else doctor, but he's a doctor too, so out of respect. Yeah. We asked him, we said "What is a safety culture?" And he said it's..." He says, "You want a simple answer?" He says, "It's a boss being able to say I was wrong," 

Laksh Raghavan: yes. 

John Willis: Yeah. Yes. Classic Decker, right? 

Laksh Raghavan: Yes. 

John Willis: The other thing I think you talked about a couple things, and I think it was Forrester, but like this idea from, adding noise to create order. Like- 

Laksh Raghavan: Yes. 

John Willis: Can you [00:08:00] go into that a little bit? That's really interesting. 

Laksh Raghavan: Ab-absolutely. I think a lot of people are surprised that how can you create order from noise?

And I think there's a specific example that we can we can go into. . So in, everyday intuition, what we learn from thermodynamics is that noise is the enemy of order, right?

You, you-- randomness actually degrades things. That is the perspective you get from mainstream science and thermodynamics. But what Feister talked about was how Randomness and noise can actually create order. And so what he did was he came up with these small cubes, and they're not just cubes.

There's a-- They actually have magnets embedded on its faces. And the north is gonna repel north, and so they have these, this [00:09:00] preference of how they're gonna click into each other, what patterns they're gonna create. And so when you place them on a tray, nothing much happens.

But when you introduce some noise, you shake that a little bit, you add noise, you add energy, then they're gonna tumble and collide over and over, and then suddenly they just snap into position according to their magnetic preferences. And that, the ordered structure just assembles itself.

So that order emerges because of that noise that we introduced. And so I think that is very important because leaders, why, I'm trying to make this point is leaders are so much against chaos. You've gotta let that chaos begin- Yeah ... before you can seek the order on the other side of the chaos.

What you're really looking for is the order on the other side of the chaos, not the perceived order that you have through your control mechanisms and top-down Tayloristic approaches that you have today. That's just the [00:10:00] illusion of control. 

John Willis: No, I think that's the, the illusion of control is really interesting.

'Cause to take it down to something tight like chaos engineering, right? The whole point of chaos engineering, and I'm sure I could come up with other better examples, but is that it's through that chaos you find the order, right? The whole... There was the Netflix story, right?

In other words I can go on and I can create procedures, and I can run stats and bar charts and pie charts on how healthy I am as a system and how well- ... the software developers and the operations team together deploy the software and manage it. But what I-- like Jesse Robbins, who was my first CEO at Chef, would say, he says he never said this, but I know he said it 'cause I wouldn't have made it up myself.

"It's not tested until you break it in production."

And so the chaos engineering idea was that you couldn't see how those magnets would assemble- 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah ... 

John Willis: without shaking it up and bringing- Yeah ... down the server. Like bringing- Yeah ... down the server itself in a service-oriented [00:11:00] architecture not the classic SOA, but like the, in, in a modern, cloud native, architecture.

By actually breaking a server, you get to see the construct of the failure, which then allows you to see how things could be improved. Yeah. I 

Laksh Raghavan: think th-th-that there are different- Layers of abstraction where you can apply this insight. Like one example is biological evolution, where nature comes up with random mutations, right?

The variety of mutations that happens in an organism is very wide, but the ones that provide significant advantages for that species over others, for that variation over others, is the one that survives. Like for example, for the bears that lives in the poles, one of those bears had a random mutation where its hair became white.

And suddenly it got an advantage where its preys cannot see them and its predators can also not see them. Yeah. [00:12:00] And so s-- and after-- give it a few million years, that becomes the predominant species that lives in, in the poles. And so randomness, is very important. Like Amazon, Jeff Bezos talks about how you, the, you ought to sow a thousand seeds because you don't know which one will grow into a mighty oak.

You have these random experiments, a lot of different trials and errors that need to happen. And only through this trial and error we are gonna find out what is the truth. You have to actually act because any business plan you just come up in your mind, it's, it's g- it's gonna get disproved the minute it interacts with reality, and so you figure it out- Right

but through interactions. 

John Willis: Yeah. I think there's a... I probably don't wanna go too deep here, but I think there's one of the-- what potentially the Cynefin architecture is supposed to be able to, like the difference between, you know complicated, complex, and chaotic, right? And the- Yeah.

Somewhere [00:13:00] between the complex and chaotic is that idea that you can't just take... There are certain things that are so emergent that you can't just take one blueprint and say, "Hey, here's how it's gonna work." You're gonna have to- 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah ... 

John Willis: a lot of experimentation. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. I think one, one thing that I'll say about Cynefin is- You know, you, before you explain The ontology, what's out there and classify that's complex, this is complicated.

You ought to first explain what your epistemology is. Because you, you-- you know, we don't have access to the external world. The, let's just-- we just talked about how colors and sounds don't exist in, out there as we perceive them. 

John Willis: Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: Those are truly our construction. If that is so in the social realm, when it comes to family or friends or organizations, [00:14:00] society, nation, we have different perspectives.

And and so without talking about the observer when something happens in an organization, it could be complex to you, John, but to me- 

John Willis: yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: It's evident. And so bringing in that multi-perspective view is very important. I would, for example, be very skeptical of a consultant who steps in and says, "Oh, yeah, that's complicated.

This is complex. That's chaotic. Here is step, here's what we gotta do." Oh yeah. 

John Willis: Yeah. And, there, there's so many variants there because there's one is unfortunately, like I, I remember Steven Spear saying in a, in a-- in that same thing we did with Decker, which was- -what was wrong with Lean, right? Where R-Richard Cook asked him "What have we gotten wrong about Lean?" And he said the, the place we got wrong is the people who write books about the twenty-one steps of Lean." It was never supposed to be that way. Yeah. But I think-- they-- I'd asked John Ostby one time what he thought about Cynefin early on.

V-- I was just getting to know him, right? [00:15:00] Didn't really know him. I would never ask him that question now and I'm on the fence. But he said, I don't like it at all." Yeah. And it was because of the abstractions. But there's a blessing and curse. Probably the most points of where I disagree with John in our-- we have hour-and-a-half, two-hour disagreement conversations where we feel like we just had the best conversation we've ever had- Yeah

Disagreeing on everything, is that there's a blessing and curse to abstractions. 

The fact that maybe there is no such thing as color red, we definitely get to stop at cars stop at stoplights because- 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. I think one of the, frequent criticisms is relativism or s-- even a worser one, which is solipsism.

We don't have to go there. Just because you encourage multiple perspectives doesn't mean, what's right for me is... Like- Yeah. It's all relative. Everybody has different per-- It w-- No, we don't have to go there. That, that's just extreme. I think, We can get into conversations and reach our [00:16:00] eigenvalue, a stable state that, you know-- Like, how do we know that a table is solid, right?

As we grow up, we touch and feel, we see, we interact. Then we interact with it. And so what survives through repeated interactions is what becomes our reality, 

John Willis: right? 

Laksh Raghavan: And we go through conversations and interactions, we can reach a stable social reality that we can all agree on. I think that is very, the very idea of the philosophy of pluralism rather than relativism or solipsism. Solipsism is the idea that, brain of act, right? How you even know we're not going there. 

John Willis: Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: We acknowledge every human is purposeful. 

And and so we-- it's the importance of having to engage in conversations becomes apparent.

John Willis: I guess that at the end of the day, as we get deeper into what second-order cybernetics is, right? Is some... Or as we certainly figure out how we get into organizational or even [00:17:00] 

Laksh Raghavan: management- ... cybernetics. Management cybernetics, 

John Willis: yeah. The art form there is to be able to somehow figure out what multiple observers in a system can agree on, right?

Is that what we're we're trying to get at? 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. How they interact. 

And how do you design an organization? So Beer went into the viable systems model which we can go into deep. Okay. We'll 

John Willis: come back 

Laksh Raghavan: to that later. Yes. And so how do you make sure that... he has a small, thin book called Designing Freedom.

And so it's a, a paradoxical ti-title, right? If you want everyone to be free, how are you talking about a top-down design? 

It appears paradoxical, but it's that nuance of, "Hey, how do you strike that balance between- Central, like Russia central control, everything is controlled centrally, top-down command and control versus freewheeling capitalism, where there are no checks and balances whatsoever.

And so how do you strike that balance where you build all of the necessary communication flows and controls and the different [00:18:00] organizational structures so that the interaction creates a system that remains viable as the environment around it changes drastically?

John Willis: Yeah, I think, I refer a lot back to Ashby's Law.

Again, I'm a meat and potatoes guy, right? And not your regular meat and potatoes 'cause not every meat and potatoes people don't quote Ashby's Law or requisite variety. But I think a lot about that, like, how do you explain how to get, you know-- And today's major topic is AI. You have to create these sort of requisite variety.

These constraints create flow, right? Yeah. Y- even I don't know, you probably... I don't know if you pay attention to any of the Dora reports. But, one, one of the most interesting thing about the most recent Dora report as it reflects on the behaviors that they're doing quantitative analysis of questions.

So yeah, we both get that, right? Yeah. But again, it's like anything else. Not all abstractions are terrible. The, Is the, what they're basically saying is throughput doesn't equal flow, right? Like- Yeah. Like this is telling us [00:19:00] exactly what Ashby's Law is telling us, is that you have to have these sort of constraints to create the real flow.

Yeah. Like just throwing up, creating a funnel of everything in it. And I guess, it sounds, that to me, that's that's a sort of a core way to think about anything, which is counterintuitive, back to your point. These things are counterintuitive to most people. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. 

John Willis: How do I ca- cr-- how, why, why-- how can a constraint create more flow, right?

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. I think it was Ashby that said, "Every law of nature is a constraint," which means we can exploit it, right? Everything that we're exploiting, we understand nature, it becomes a constraint, then we can actually exploit it. And organizational constraints are no different. I think, but first we have to talk about what Ashby's Law is.

And before I do that, I wanna convey how important it is to every manager and leader and executive [00:20:00] i-i-in technology in Silicon Valley or any other industry for that matter. Beer said- What Einstein's law, how important it is to physics, Ashby's law is that important to management 

John Willis: Wow. Wow.

Laksh Raghavan: Ashby's law of requisite variety, that's what it's called, and it's very simple and yet very profound. And he said, "Only variety can absorb variety." 

And as it turns out The variety of the environment obviously is gonna be much more than the variety of the system, right?

All I hold in my head is a model of what I think is my universe, my world. 

And clearly, the universe and the world that we live in is much more complex than what I can make sense of. And so then if that is how do organisms stay viable in that environment? So it's not really about [00:21:00] truth-seeking, it's really about survival, right?

How do you survive? Even though you may never truly understand what, a photon light is, you can understand colors and, if you're an animal, you can differentiate between what is a food and what is a prey. Yeah. And, in the modern-- if you're a modern man, the green light and the red light is a question of death and, survival for you on the road.

Yeah. And so we have figure... evolution has given us senses to make model of this world so that we can survive. And so really what a management can do is only two things. One, they can attenuate the complexity of the environment that reaches the system. And so they can say, "Ignore these things.

This is just noise." Or the, the, the entire structure of the system is designed in such a way that they ignore those things as noise. And the other thing you can do is increase your own [00:22:00] variety, your own complexity or capacity to respond to that perturbance from the environment. And so those are really-- fundamentally, those are the two things.

How? The devil is in the details, and it's different for different companies and whatnot. Yeah. But you need to understand this fundamental idea first so that because many times, in the viable systems model, Beer talks about the here and now versus then and there. What's gonna happen this quarter?

Will the company survive a hundred years from now? Many times we optimize for the short term. "Okay, I'm gonna-- I, I don't think we can hit the quarterly profit that we promised the street or the analysts, and so we're gonna lay off five percent." Versus what is that going to do to the long-term viability of the company?

You don't know. You're probably not gonna stick around. How do you strike that balance? So that is built into the viable systems model so that, there is no conflict between the here and now and then and there, [00:23:00] for example. 

John Willis: Yeah. All right, so I'm gonna bring it all the way back up, right? Yep. I get a lot of complaints, right?

So when I get a little bit meta in my presentations, I'll get people that come up and say, "That was really fascinating, John, but there is no way I can have that conversation with my boss." Or they'll talk about how I remember being in, in, in one working group for a paper that we were working on through Gene's organization, and this was a senior leader, and I was mentioning "Hey, we probably should add a section about this."

And they're like: "You kidding me? My CIO doesn't even read books." And again, we can blame a lot of that on sort of Western MBAs and all that sort of stuff. But I guess the question I have is, I find everything you say incredibly fascinating, but I suspect there's a lot of people that- Yeah

don't find everything that you say fascinating because it would hurt their head. And so how do you convey these type of ideas to a leader? Do you just say, "Hey..." One school of consulting is only talk [00:24:00] to the people who will listen to you, and- ... most of us have done pretty well in that world because we know- Yeah

that's an effective the leaders that wanna know, but they're so sh- far and few between. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yes. 

John Willis: Even if they say on that first call they wanna know, when you get to the second call, third call, right? So how do you take all these great ideas, which we know are fundamentally truths, you know, like the quote of the, Beer saying about Ashby's law, being equivalent to Einstein's, work, right?

Like, how do you work... how do you practice this with leaders, does that make sense? 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think transformed organizations are downstream of transformed leaders. All this work around change management and organizational transformation, all of that is complete waste if the leader at the top, himself or herself, has not been transformed, right? And this is the same problem that Deming faced, right?

It's [00:25:00] the same problem. We're still- Deming 

John Willis: wouldn't work with a leader who wanted to proxy off the conversation, right? Like- 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. Yeah. And so we face the same problem. And I will say this one thing. In the last two years of me being an entrepreneur talking about these ideas, when I, talk about the typical sales funnel, at the top of the funnel would be many founders and entrepreneurs that, talk to me they look at my posts somewhere on LinkedIn or their contact mentions them.

They'll come and talk to me. But as I go through the funnel, at the bottom of the funnel, the people who Open their wallets, take out and give me money, and engage me as a coach or a mentor or even for a consulting gig. There's one common pattern that I've noticed- 

John Willis: Okay ... 

Laksh Raghavan: in all of them after noting- 

John Willis: All right, everybody, turn...

can you put Notepad out? Let's write this down. Hurry up. Go ahead. 

Laksh Raghavan: So the only common denominator is those founders own their company [00:26:00] hundred percent. 

John Willis: Okay. 

Laksh Raghavan: Fully bootstrapped. 

John Willis: Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: They own the company. It's their baby. 

John Willis: Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: It's grown to a hundred people, across five different countries. Their internal complexity is exploded.

They have no clue because, they have layers of managers now. 

John Willis: Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: And they they see a new opportunity, as AI is coming, they get new ideas. They want the team to go build stuff. Not happening, right? They see a threat of the competition. Competitors are cutting prices. Their customers are walking away.

They see the, the... what's happening. They want the company to pivot, but they're not able to. They've brought in the McKinsey. Yeah. They've brought in, they've tried agile, they've tried everything. They-- nothing works, and they say, "Okay, Laksh, your ideas resonate. Tell me what to do." The first thing I say is, "First you gotta be humble," right?

The first epistemic humility is that we've tried everything. Yeah. They cannot run off to another company, right? As a VPs to go do the same thing. It's their company. It's their [00:27:00] baby, 

John Willis: right? 

Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: So they-- only they are truly curious. They want to listen, and they want to learn.

They wanna transform themselves. You can bring a horse, as the saying goes, to the water, John. You cannot make it drink. 

John Willis: Yeah, no, I... Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. So I-I-I don't go pressure anyone or thinking that, we can transform them. We can ask probing questions and get them to think for themselves and self-reflect and realize, "Okay, maybe I was fooled by randomness where to get to where I am today as an executive.

I only know so much, and I need to go, learn and truly learn these ideas and start applying them, start living them in your life." 

Even if not work, you can apply these ideas as a father, as a husband, right? 

John Willis: Yeah, and I think there's a counterintuitive switch that has to get turned on.

You know what I mean? I think, I think about things like agile, lean, more about DevOps or [00:28:00] about the things we talk about now, which are, like, much, a, a deeper level of all those things, right? But there's a point at which like again, to be able to say, "Did I get here because I was lucky?"

"Or did I get here or am I just..." In other words, be able to take the obvious out of the equation. And then be able to rethink. Again, I think it's again, a sort of a form of em-empathy or, again, what you call the, Or I think I love the what you call the epistemic humility, right?

Be able to step out of your sort of self and reflect on different alternatives. 

Laksh Raghavan: Absolutely. Again it's not my term. It comes deeply from the works the-- of epistemology, people who came before, before me years and years ago. But there, there is this saying in military circles, like, because this is not a problem that we're just encountering in tech, right?

Yeah. It's been around for ages. Oh, 

John Willis: yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: And there's this saying in US military circles that [00:29:00] once you become a one-star general, you will never have a bad meal, but you'll never hear the truth again. And so once you are so abstracted away from the truth on the Gemba, then it becomes you...

The people who are self-reflective are the ones who say, "Okay, I don't know the truth. I have to go and find out for myself," and cut through the layers of management and go talk to people. You're right. 

John Willis: It gets a lot harder. Even like startup's a good example because when a startup leader has success and then everybody around them starts seeing the dollar signs around- their position in that success cycle, right? That's the... They'll never get criticized ever again, right? In other words- Yeah ... you always great-- eat great meals, but you'll never be told anything bad- Yeah ... about what you do, right? And you wind up- Yeah ... getting isolated on. Yeah, and it's tough. It's, you've been in-- I've been in leadersh- some leadership roles and, people, people that you've worked with [00:30:00] before you were their leader or their boss Act completely different once you're- Yes

Laksh Raghavan: involved, 

John Willis: right? So yeah. Yes. Yeah all right, then, I think I think we've covered a lot of good ground here today, as always. And I think we'll try to queue one up for getting into sort of cybernetics, the management of cybernetics, Beer's work. I know we built a little bit with Glenn on my last podcast about the viable systems model, but I think we can really go into some examples of how we can get that to work, particularly with AI right now.

I think we could have a lot of fun on what are all the... i've been seeing a lot of the agentic, agentic being a proxy for a lot of wrong things, but then some real interesting thing, positive things. Things are always not as simple as it's all bad or it's all good, right?

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. John thank you so much for having me on and having this conversation- Oh, friend ... around second-order cybernetics and its importance to management. Very happy to come and talk about management cybernetics and Stafford Beer in general. [00:31:00] I would like to leave you and the listeners with a very old philosophical question of, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Thank you. Thank you, John. 

John Willis: Take care. All right. Bye-bye. 

Laksh Raghavan: Cheers.