Reflection of study tour engagement

Students and staff from the Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) visited on a study tour in June hosted by The Australian National University (ANU) McCusker Institute. As part of the tour’s activities, ANU School of Cybernetics’ Dr Sungyeon Hong and Thomas Biedermann facilitated workshops.

In the briefing the 30 participants received from WWF-Hong Kong, they were urged to consider: How can the rights of Indigenous People be respected and cultural heritage preserved, during mega-scale development initiatives such as Hong Kong’s Northern Metropolis Project?

The reflections of the HKBU students and colleagues helped us see Australia through a new perspective. Their highlights gravitated around the many opportunities to learn through direct engagement, from behind-the-scenes museum visits to guided on-Country walks and Welcome to Country ceremonies. Their curiosity about, and engagement with, Australian First Nations’ Knowledge Systems and ways of being offered a timely reminder that learning across cultures and contexts is not simply about receiving new information. It can also unsettle familiar assumptions, make different relationships visible, and expand the range of perspectives through which we understand a place, a system, or a problem.

In that sense, the Study Tour echoed many of the ideas explored across the two workshops. Whether through emergence and adaptation, participatory modelling, or the five very different perspective expressed from the same brief, the program repeatedly demonstrated that complex issues rarely admit a single useful perspective. What matters is our capacity to encounter difference, make our assumptions visible, and bring diverse forms of knowledge into productive dialogue.

Sungyeon’s teachings#

The participants spent an hour with Sungyeon exploring Emergence and Hopeful Futures. Her workshop introduced the ideas of self-organisation as a key mechanism through which many systems navigate ever-changing environments and adapt to recurrent perturbations.

Self-organisation#

The concept is broad, and describes a process through which patterns or structures arise from interactions among the components of a system, without a central controller directing the overall outcome. Ants, for example, can collectively find routes to food sources by responding to pheromone trails. Birds align their movements with nearby birds to produce ‘murmurations’. Vehicles respond individually to neighbouring cars, pedestrians and traffic signals, yet together can produce traffic jams that were never designed into the road system. In our brains, neurons communicate through electrical and chemical signals while collectively giving rise to higher-level phenomena, such as cognition, consciousness and emotions.

Individual agents sense aspects of their environment, process information, and respond locally. Yet their interactions can cause behaviour at a larger scale that no individual agent intends or can fully predict.

This observation led the workshop towards questions of resilience and adaptability under perturbation. We often associate resilience with order, stability, careful planning, and the ability to keep things functioning as intended. But complex systems suggest that sometimes resilience depends not on preserving a fixed structure, but on maintaining the capacity to respond, reorganise and adapt when circumstances change. This resonates with cybernetician W. Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety: broadly put, responding effectively to a varied and changing environment requires a corresponding variety of possible responses. Resilience, from this perspective, is therefore not simply about resisting disruption, but about retaining enough flexibility to meet it.

Perturbations#

Perturbations — whether an environmental shock, a policy intervention, a technological change or an unexpected social response — can reveal relationships and dependencies that are otherwise difficult to see. They can also create the conditions from which new patterns emerge. Ants can find new paths when their trails are disturbed; a flock of birds appears erratic when threatened by a predator; road accidents, closures and vehicle braking disrupt flow. Our brains, too, have some capacity to reorganise in response to changing conditions and experience, with neural connections adapting rather than remaining fixed throughout our lives.

In all these varying systems, resilience does not necessarily mean returning everything to exactly as it was.

Resilience can emerge through the capacity of many interacting components to sense change, respond locally, and collectively reorganise.

From a cybernetic perspective, this shifts our attention from asking only, ‘How do we control the system?’ towards questions such as: How does the system respond? What feedback is available? Where does adaptive capacity sit? And what kinds of conditions might allow more desirable futures to emerge?

For the participants, these ideas provided another way of approaching the challenge posed by WWF-Hong Kong. A grand-scale development cannot be understood only as a technical planning problem. It involves many interacting actors, histories, relationships, institutions, environments, and forms of knowledge. Actions taken in one part of the system may have consequences elsewhere — some anticipated, others emergent. Thinking in terms of self-organisation and adaptation, therefore, invites us to pay close attention not only to intended outcomes, but also to the relationships and conditions from which outcomes arise.

Thomas’ teachings#

Where Sungyeon’s morning session had considered how complex behaviour can emerge through interaction, Thomas’ afternoon session invited participants to explore and express their own perspectives on which elements and interactions are most relevant in this complex transformation. To do this, Thomas introduced participants to rapid game design, anchored by a deceptively simple question: can we game this system?

Games can model existing systems by translating relevant elements and interactions into game components and mechanics.

These simulation games offer two key benefits: they are accessible to a broad range of participants and encourage ongoing engagement with societal transformation. This makes them a useful tool for gathering different perspectives – and the insights they bring – in conversation.

Following a short introduction on these characteristics and historical uses of games for promoting systemic thinking and action, the participants undertook a crash course in game design. They then worked in five groups to translate their perspectives of the issue into playable game prototypes. The exercise asked them to make choices about who or what mattered in the system, how different actors related to one another, what resources or constraints shaped their actions, and what counted as a desirable — or undesirable — outcome. The five groups generated wildly varied responses to the WWF Hong-Kong brief.

Using games to express different perspectives on a system#

The first was a competitive card game in which players’ knowledge of traditional Cantonese is their main power to defeat others and protect themselves. This prototype foregrounded cultural preservation and transmission as core issues to consider as part of the development project. The second and third groups chose to leverage the classic game Monopoly, developing new rules and dynamics on its familiar core, to emphasise two key dimensions of the development project. The second game highlighted the power structures at play in the development project by crafting an asymmetric game in which Indigenous People seek to maintain and rejuvenate cultural practices and knowledge on a game board that is, initially at least, firmly under the control of property developers. The third game developed mechanics through which player decisions reshape the board itself as the game progresses, foregrounding how perturbations impact large scale and long-term projects.

The fourth game was a collaborative, light roleplaying game, in which a similar group of stakeholders must work together to leverage their strengths and trade resources they are uniquely placed to generate. This unique take resonated with the group, by showing that we do not need to default to competition and zero-sum thinking in complex transformations. The last game brought into focus how complex transformations impact different groups in different ways, modelling this dynamic by developing rules under which the same in-game effects impact players differently, based on the in-game role they take.

The designs were imagined and prototyped, from scratch, in one short hour. Each group synthesised a different take on who and what matters into an engaging simulation game, ready to spark new conversations and learning. From a cybernetic perspective, this exercise revealed the variety of perspectives that exist within and about a system. This rapid exercise in participatory systems mapping raised questions such as:

• Who gets to model what matters in complex systems?
• How can we critically assess the models that mediate how we engage with a complex world?
• And how do we bring different perspectives into productive dialogue to shape better models and better systems towards hopeful futures?

The HKBU students will present their learnings at the Pacific Asia Summit on Transdisciplinary Education (PASTE2026) in Hong Kong this November. We are grateful to the ANU McCusker Institute’s Michelle Cheah, Siobhan Hudson and Chris Browne, and Hong Kong Baptist University’s Glos Ho, Katrina Leung, Patrick Yue and Ho Yan Kwan, and of course all the students who brought such energy, openness and imagination to make memorable sessions together.

The workshops facilitated by Sungyeon and Thomas form part of the ANU McCusker Institute’s broader SoCIETIE program of experiential and transdisciplinary learning. They invite participants to engage with complex problems through systems thinking, emergence, participatory modelling and multiple ways of knowing. For those interested in taking part in similar workshops, further information is available on the program website.