Dr Merrelyn Emery (1940–2026)
BPsych University of New England (UNE) | BPsych (Hons) UNE | PhD Marketing University of New South Wales (UNSW)
Dr Merrelyn Emery was an Australian social scientist who many regard as one of the country’s most influential and least-recognised-at-home organisational and social change experts. Her work as a management systems theorist and practitioner is internationally renowned, and has shaped companies, governments and communities all over the world.
Growing up in remote Australia#
Merrelyn Burchett was born 27 April, 1940, in Broken Hill, into what she described as a family with a ‘matriarchal Cornish Celtic heritage,’ one that emphasised education, democracy and equality. She spent part of her childhood living in an Aboriginal community in Australia, an experience she regarded as one of the great formative influences of her life. There, she learned both the language and how to physically look at the world.
“The closest I can come to it is a period of intense concentration where you can see little tiny details. You don’t use it all the time. I had to learn how to do it when we used to hunt little brown sand frogs for fun. They show only the tiniest hole in the sand so if you can’t see the hole, you can’t find them.”
As a kid in the bush, Merrelyn also absorbed stories and the whole way of life. She credited Indigenous ways of knowing as a science in their own right, rooted in close, sustained observation of the real world rather than abstraction. Her deep respect for Indigenous ways of knowing, and her dogged commitment to scientific observation and evidence, were reflected throughout her work.
Before her work in social science took shape, Merrelyn began her studies in medical school at the University of New England (UNE) before following her interests and transitioning into a psychology degree. Her first postgraduate roles were concurrently as a high school maths teacher – one of the few career paths open to women in Australia at the time – and a research assistant in education at UNE.
Family and a move to Canberra#
Around this time, she married Bruce Butterfield, and the couple went on to have three boys together. The family moved first to Sydney as Bruce took a role at IBM, and then back to the cleaner air in New England, where Merrelyn was kept busy raising the family and completing her Honours research. The family subsequently moved to Canberra, where both she and Bruce took up positions at The Australian National University (ANU). Merrelyn’s main concern at the time was building a financially stable home for their family.
Merrelyn worked at ANU from 1967 until her retirement in 1997. She commenced as a part-time demonstrator in the ANU Department of Psychology (1967), before taking a role as a research assistant for a survey of part-time students which was being run by the Education Research Unit in the ANU Research School of Social Sciences (1968–69). Merrelyn then moved to the ANU Centre for Continuing Education (CCE), where she worked as a tutor and research assistant, before being appointed as a Lecturer in 1976. She worked at the CCE 1970–1997.
A career in systems theory and practice#
Some years after moving to Canberra, Merrelyn was on a train from Canberra to Perth for an adult education conference alongside a colleague, Fred Emery. Fred was internationally famous following his 1965 and 1967 papers introducing Open Systems Theory (OST), and after his Norwegian Industrial Democracy Program was pronounced a success.
“He had the big multinationals after him as soon as he hit Australia. That is where the famous experiments at ICI in 1972 came from,” Merrelyn explained.
As they sat on the train, he asked her to read the galley proof of ‘On Purposeful Systems,’ a book he had written with Russell Ackoff. From that moment, she recalls, she was “rapt in systems thinking.”
This train journey marked the beginning of their lifelong partnership.Together, Fred and Merrelyn further developed, expanded and implemented OST, a transdisciplinary framework holding that organisations are not isolated entities but interconnected with their broader social and ecological environment. They detailed two core organisational design principles. People and organisations falter in hierarchical structures with top-down control that treat humans as replaceable spare parts. And they thrive when they are structured to take active, collective responsibility for cooperating towards a common purpose and adapting to their environments.
Fred and Merrelyn’s relationship was at once professional and personal, and together they raised Merrelyn’s three sons, Fred’s youngest daughter, and their shared daughter. They chose not to marry but Merrelyn changed her last name. The reason speaks volumes about their partnership and shared aspirations:
“We thought Emery and Emery sounded like a good publishing name,” said Merrelyn.
From 1970 at CCE, their work started on two fronts. First, the development of the Search Conference as a method to define an organisation or group’s strategic direction and future goals, by bringing a community together to read its own environment and plan for it. Second, the design of a method of organisational democratisation, the Participative Design Workshop (PDW), in order to restructure an organisation to implement the outcomes of the Search. The Search and PDW are OST’s best-known practical tools, and knowledge of them spread around the world.
The Emerys worked together as much as possible but also pursued their own interests and emphases within OST. In the early days, Fred continued with the major dimensions of the PDW and the industrial scene, while Merrelyn did most of the development of the theory and practice of the Search Conference and later, Unique Designs and the Two Stage Model. Fred had more of an interest in defence, while Merrelyn investigated the role that the design principles played in group dynamics. The various aspects of their work contributed to a comprehensive framework of practical ideas which have been applied – and can still be applied today – to a wide diversity of puzzles and problems.
Many successful Searches were held in the 1970s and 1980s in countless international businesses, organisations and community groups. Merrelyn carried out ongoing research into long-term implementation of the outcomes of the Search, leading to identification of shortcomings and further methodological innovation. And all of this at a time where women, including Merrelyn, continued to face systemic barriers in the academic workforce.
A scholar ahead of her time#
Apart from the huge number of Search Conferences and Participatory Design Workshops that shaped whole industries, issues and organisations, Merrelyn’s work was consistently ahead of its time in other fields too. Long before screen time became a subject of public anxiety, Merrelyn was already studying it rigorously, ranging across established disciplines to do so.
In her doctoral research, she examined the neurophysiological effects of cathode ray tube television, under the supervision of Stan Glaser. While her PhD was based in the Department of Marketing at UNSW, she carried out much of the research in the library at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), while the family travelled with Fred, who was spending a sabbatical at Penn with Russell Ackoff. She completed the work in two years, although her doctorate wasn’t awarded until later, a product of the transdisciplinary nature of her work.
“One of the reasons they wouldn’t award it to me until 1986,” she reflected, smiling, “was because the director of marketing said, ‘Oh, it’s a lovely thesis, but there’s no reference to marketing.’ So then I had to go back and add in chapters on the implications of marketing.”
Her data demonstrated that prolonged exposure to this form of light – radiant light – caused measurable cortical slowing and a corresponding loss of analytic capacity.
When the first findings were first published in A Choice of Futures in 1976, they drew intense attention and were bitterly opposed by the television industry and many academics who had a stake in educational TV. Merrelyn persisted with the work in spite of the backlash, and from her doctoral work to a paper published in 2025, she argued, based on a growing body of evidence, that screens alter how children perceive and learn. As the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations points out;
“It was a lonely argument for most of those fifty years. It reads very differently now that legislation on social media for under-16s is under debate.”
Today, contemporary studies on screens and learning are beginning to arrive at conclusions she reached half a century ago.
A legacy of organisational and community change#
It was a peculiarly Australian irony, often noted by those who knew their work, that the Emerys found far greater recognition abroad than at home. By the mid-1990s, companies including Xerox, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft had adopted the Emerys’ team-based methods, particularly the Search, online user groups had formed around their ideas, and the American Journal for Quality and Participation had created an award in Fred Emery’s name for excellence in team working.
Colleagues lamented that local Australian industry was often slower to embrace ideas that had been developed in its own backyard, yet the Emerys’ work also quietly shaped their own backyard. They stood for democracy and against organisations that take people’s decision-making capacity away from them. The theory and methods they developed underpinned national workplace relations reform, and were used extensively by Australian corporations, unions, and public institutions to build consensus and co-design workplace changes.
As Fred’s health increasingly confined him to Canberra in his final years, it was Merrelyn who carried the practice forward, with much of her work involving running participative OST courses in the United States and Canada with more clients subsequently coming from those countries. He passed away in 1997.
A researcher committed to improving the world#
Merrelyn worked tirelessly through the 2000s on local, national and global societal challenges. She worked on various OST industry projects, including with Telstra, Dyno Nobel and J Robins (Australia’s largest shoe manufacturer at the time) in collaboration with Peter Aughton. The two also collaborated to modify the Search to enable communities to develop plans to mitigate and adapt to climate change. She also drew together her lifetime of attention to emotions, affect and joy. From her childhood observations that humans are an emotional species, to her surprise that some psychological theories she was taught ignored emotions entirely, to working with OST methods, where it became obvious that the emotions were highly associated with success, a focus on affect was a clear thread through her work. In her later years she demonstrated empirically that organisational structure is a key determinant of mental health outcomes among employees.
“This is part,” she wrote, “of the overall effort to combat the global epidemic of depression and to restore people to health in innovative, productive organisations through democratisation.”
Merrelyn continued to hold an adjunct professorship at Concordia University in Montreal until her death, and she was a founding director of the Fred Emery Institute. Her published works are extensive, and her never-published consulting reports which changed entire communities and industries around the world are just as numerous. Colleagues describe her as one of the most rigorous and uncompromising empiricists in her field, insistent that social science earn its keep by being tested against reality rather than merely argued in theory.
Always dedicated to high-quality, accurate work, Merrelyn continued to write until her final days, publishing what she called her ‘last book’ in early 2026 — a renewed plea for taking open systems thinking seriously in the face of climate change and what she saw as the world’s deepening maladaptation to it. Her work is carried forward by a global community of researchers and practitioners who continue to take OST into workplaces, classrooms, and communities, and a body of work that continues to shape how people think about participation, democracy, and the systems that govern daily life.
This biography was prepared by Merrelyn Emery and Amy McLennan, who collaborated through in-person conversations and real-time document editing, with input from Peter Aughton, Andrew Meares, Matthew Holt and Katherine Daniell. It will continue to expand as we learn more from the many stories and materials Merrelyn and her family have entrusted to our care. Research about Merrelyn’s life story and contributions is ongoing, and is covered by ANU human research ethics protocol 2019/388.
The Merrelyn Emery archive#
About the archive#
Merrelyn Emery and her family are proud to place this collection of Dr Merrelyn Emery’s works and materials with the ANU School of Cybernetics. The primary goal of the archive is to keep Merrelyn’s groundbreaking work in open systems theory alive and active.
The Merrelyn Emery Archive spans a wide range of both published and unpublished works, personal and professional correspondence, and family photographs. It complements the National Library of Australia collection entitled Papers of Fred and Merrelyn Emery, 1943-1997, which chiefly comprises papers of or about Fred Emery.
The ANU School of Cybernetics is dedicated to preserving Merrelyn’s vibrant legacy within the systems theory and practice community. We are honoured to have Merrelyn and her family’s trust to act as a safe custodian for these materials, ensuring they inspire future generations of systems thinkers.
Management and family oversight#
While the archive is securely housed at the ANU School of Cybernetics, Merrelyn’s family intends to maintain an active role and final decision-making power regarding the collection. We view this arrangement as a trusted partnership, which began with co-designing these guidelines in consultation with Merrelyn and her family.
- Custodianship and location: The collection will be securely stored at the ANU School of Cybernetics as a dedicated collection. The collection will be backed up on ANU servers, but access will remain managed and/or restricted according to the access guidelines detailed below.
- Regular touchpoints: Merrelyn’s family invites and welcomes an ongoing and collaborative relationship with the ANU School of Cybernetics to ensure the collection best achieves the vision for the collection and meets the access guidelines.
- Decennial review: Every ten years, the Emery family and the ANU School of Cybernetics will jointly review these guidelines to ensure they still serve Merrelyn’s legacy and the family’s needs.
Access guidelines#
All materials already published in the public domain and/or on Merrelyn’s extensive website, which is maintained by members of her family, will remain open to the public.
To safeguard the integrity of non-published material, parts of The Merrelyn Emery Archive are closed. Permission to view or research these items will be managed via a careful process.
- Primary responsibility: The Director of the ANU School of Cybernetics carries the responsibility of vetting access requests and/or delegating that responsibility.
- Collaborative custodianship: All questions of access should be discussed by a group of people to ensure multiple perspectives consider the request. This should be achieved by tabling the request at a regular Leadership Team meeting.
- The importance of integrity: Access will only be granted to people with integrity, a rigorous approach to research, and a genuine interest in keeping the work of Merrelyn Emery alive. In Merrelyn’s own words, “I would only want access for people who had some sort of track record or had proven that they were honest. They had some integrity. They weren’t going to abuse this stuff.”
- Application process: Application to access the collection can be made any time. It should include a one-page proposal outlining the proposed topic, approach, outputs, significance, timeline, and a short CV.
- Publication: Should any person desire to publish materials reproduced from the archive, including photographs, the researcher must approach the family to explain the circumstances and ask permission. The ANU School of Cybernetics will facilitate this process.
- Sensitive matters and materials: For any complex requests, and/or sensitive correspondence and photographs, the Director will consult with the Emery family before granting access.
