Veryard Projects - people finder

	people finder
> notion finder > company finder	This page covers people who are currently active, or who were active in the past 100 years For earlier influences (including Chinese, Greek, Roman and Mediaeval thinkers), please go to the Historical Page.

A	Christopher Alexander - pioneer of design patterns and a novel approach to planning
B	Gregory Bateson - master of paradox Stafford Beer - mapper of viable systems Albert Borgmann - deep and unusual insights into technology Stewart Brand - change how you think about architecture and time
D	Jacques Derrida - master of deconstruction
E	Jon Elster Milton Erikson - a hypnotherapist who has profoundly influenced change management
F	Michel Foucault - master of discourse
H	Larry Hirschhorn - change how you think about organizations and boundaries
K	Kevin Kelly - change how you think about systems and control
L	Jacques Lacan - French psychoanalyst Imre Lakatos - brilliant analysis of proofs and refutations Bruno Latour - places science and technology into their social context
M	Peter Marris - good insights on social change Humberto Maturana Lewis Mumford - one of the great writers on society and technology
P	Barry Palmer
V	Francisco Varela Veryards Sir Geoffrey Vickers - a wise and reflective man of affairs who had a profound influence on systems thinking and practice
W	Karl Weick - change how you think about organizations and change Jerry Weinberg

Stewart Brand

veryard projects > people > Stewart Brand

Former editor of Whole Earth Review.

Author of an outstanding book on architecture: How Buildings Learn, from which we take the notion of Shearing Layers.

Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. Viking 1994. In this detailed and well-illustrated book, Brand shows how buildings adapt to changing requirements over long periods. The book inspired a 6-part TV series by the BBC. (Comments critical of the architect Lord Rogers have been removed from the British edition. Despite this, Brand himself, in a comment on the Amazon.co.uk website, recommends the British edition.)

Milton Erikson

veryard projects > people > Milton Erikson

Milton Erikson was a remarkable hypnotherapist. His style and techniques were a significant influence on NeuroLinguistic Programming, as well as other schools of Change Management.

On this website, we refer to his technique of prescribing the symptom and reframing, and his treatment of resistance.

The best account of his work is probably Uncommon Therapy by Jay Haley (an associate of Gregory Bateson).

Kevin Kelly

veryard projects > people > Kevin Kelly

Former editor of Whole Earth Review and Wired Magazine.

Has written some excellent books, which document and synthesize some important social and technical developments.

Books Kevin Kelly. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World. UK edition is published by Fourth Estate, London, 1994.
Out of Control is a wide-ranging and excellently researched compendium of large complex systems. Kelly has found interesting parallels between a variety of disciplines, from biology to computer science, and from mathematics to government. Kelly ends with what he calls The Nine Laws of God - nine principles which he claims to find in the design or growth of all large complex systems, both "natural" and "artificial".

Online Version

Books Kevin Kelly. New Rules for the New Economy: 10 ways the network economy is changing everything. US edition Viking Penguin. UK edition Fourth Estate, London. 1998.
A systematic analysis of the strategies for successful business in the new world. This is the open, distributed, connected, chaotic world he described in his previous book, Out of Control.
New Rules for the New Economy is a much thinner volume than Out of Control. It explores some of the business paradoxes of the Internet, and turning the Nine Laws of God into a more practical set of rules-of-thumb for being successful in a networked world. Think of it as a pattern language for e-business.

Online Version

Kevin Kelly's website

Peter Marris

veryard projects > people > Peter Marris

Marris has spent several decades studying the ways people give meaning to their lives, especially under adversity. He is Emeritas Professor of Social Planning at UCLA.

His work on risk and uncertainty includes some good insights on Organizations that Maintain a Double Boundary.

Books Peter Marris. The Politics of Uncertainty. Routledge 1996
Marris offers an analysis of socioeconomic risk, based on a combination of Marx and Bowlby. I was carried along by his moral indignation, but I remain unconvinced by his logical argument. Nonetheless, it provides a very interesting contrast to Larry Hirschhorn's book Reworking Authority. Chapter 7 is particularly recommended.

Earlier books include Loss and Change, and Meaning and Action. There is also a novel.

Barry Palmer

veryard projects > people > Barry Palmer

10th November 1998. Today I attended the funeral of Barry Palmer, who died last month following a a triple heart bypass operation. We buried him in Highgate Cemetary, overlooked by the ironically twinned graves of Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer.

Barry Palmer Barry was an independent consultant and writer, with a special interest in the application of systems thinking and psychology to problems of organisational strategy, design and development. With Nano McCaughan, he wrote Systems Thinking for Harassed Managers (Karnac Books, 1994). Some of his shorter writings can be found on the Boxer Research Limited website.

I shall remember Barry for his quiet but insistent intellectual honesty and integrity, his tireless search for truth, his thoughtfulness, his evident spirituality. He remains an inspiring example, and I shall miss him.

Systems Thinking for Harassed Managers is a short and simple introduction to systems thinking, firmly embedded in the practice of management and consultancy.

veryard projects > people