 I'm Ray Eisen, I'm Professor of Systems at the Open University in the UK. I've been there for 25 years as a professor of systems. There are not many professors of systems in the world and that's one of the problems we have because there are not many sites or locations where systems education in a comprehensive manner is undertaken. The Open University has been engaged in systems education for the best part of 50 years and so I'll be talking about some of that experience as well as some of my own experience this morning. I'm going to talk today about what I call a series of waves of enthusiasm for systems and systems ideas which have happened over my lifetime and the period before. These waves of enthusiasm and activity have always attracted an interesting group of people but they've come crashing to the ground without much effect, without being institutionalised and without sustaining themselves over the longer term. So I see this event, this conversation as part of a new wave of enthusiasm for systems and systems ideas which I welcome, but my mission if you like is to try and get people to think why these things failed in the past and what needs to happen now for it to sustain it. And I would say that the mainstream paradigm which it's trying to replace is exceptionally powerful and bites back very powerful. Systems as an intellectual area and a practical area has not really flourished in universities at all because universities have become more systematic, more focused, more reductionist if you like, more discipline bound and the metrics for academic performance reinforce those sorts of behaviours. But there's lots of innovation going on in social entrepreneurial activities, NGOs think tanks, innovation labs, these sorts of areas which I think is a great thing and there's no doubt that there's an increase in the expression of social need because quite frankly the situation we're in is highly problematic and we've got to get ourselves out of it. What I don't see though is, well, I see a little bit too much hand-waving and there's not enough deep engagement with building a network of institutionalised paradigm-busting organisations, a new ecology that's going to supplant the old ecology. Well anyone who tries to understand this field needs to appreciate the role of a set of conferences in the US called the Macy Conferences after the Second World War and think about who the people were in those conferences and what they then went on to do and what I call the traditions of understanding that grew out of those particular conversations and many of the issues that were debated and argued about then are unresolved now and there's no doubt that there have been many things that have been highly successful the rise of computing, Von Neumann and others were part of these conversations and what I would call first order cybernetics which are around control theory if you think of the development of weapon systems and all of those sorts of things the military industrial complex, Robert McNamara, Vietnam, they were all influenced by systems ideas and of course systems ideas can be used for good and bad and that's the issue, or A issue that has to be carried on board but there were other issues perhaps reflected in the bifurcation of the cybernetics moving into first and second order cybernetics that marked a significant shift in the way at least some of those people began to think and that second order shift hasn't necessarily been built into the institutions and practices or it's a big issue, I was going to get back into the basic conferences and perhaps explore the concept of feedback feedback is a classic first order cybernetics concept a control system in a thermostat is a feedback process but Kurt Levine was also a participant in some of those basic conferences and is responsible for the ideas around action research and really for the ideas of how we use feedback in group processes and learning so within the social domain but we've lost track in the institutional arrangements we've built and the classic case is government or governance Governance comes from the cybernetic metaphor and it's essentially the enactment of feedback but our governance systems are incapable of enacting that dynamics and processes and I've written a book with Ed Straw which is about to be published which is about how to address the systemic failure of our governance systems which I think is really where most of the gains have got to be made in the future