IT is driven by STEM culture and its technical imperative, enabling the creation of technically advanced products. The issue though is that software development is inherently a sociotechnical enterprise. And the social aspects of it are often undervalued, even overlooked. We write software with people for people and sustainable solutions for both us and the users can only be reached by jointly optimise the technical and the social.

In this talk we will explore an approach from social sciences called Open Systems Theory. By looking at the milestones that led to this conceptual framework, like replacing the machine view the world, discovering group dynamics, realising that individuals only grow in groups, defining people as open purposeful systems, democratisation of work, discovering the genotypical organisational design principles, and understanding how critical participative design is to lasting and sustainable solutions.

The goal is to show that this approach will not only helps us create a learning organisation where people thrive and technology operates closer to its potential, but also one that performs better in an increasingly complex and competitive environment.

The world around us are getting ever increasingly hard to understand and predict in the way that we are used to. Simply taking a system apart and studying the elements and making useful models out of them seems to fail more often than not. Systems thinking is by many regarded as an essential tool for dealing with this kind of complexity, where unpredictability and ambiguity is the name of the game. The thing is that even though systems thinking is regarded as a new science, it is not an easy task to get a hang of. Not only is it mind-bending and frequently counter-intuitive, there are also numerous different schools of thought that frames things very differently and are useful for different things.

In this talk we will take a look at some of those schools of thought, with a specific focus on open systems as those are the kind of systems we frequently have to deal with in software development that is fundamentally a socio-technical enterprise. We will look into how important the environment is when dealing with such open systems and how we then collectively using participative democracy can deal with much of the complexity that the extended social field expose us to. We will see how we as a social system can become a learning organisation, which not only can adapt and be resilient, but even actively affect our futures. With the theory and the practices from open systesm theory under our belt will we not only cope better, we can actually thrive and build a better world for us all.