The Cybernetics of Dispute

The argument that finally breaks out in the Thursday meeting is never really about the thing that started it. Someone makes a small remark about a missed deadline, and within ninety seconds two people are saying things they have clearly been saving for months. The room is stunned by the disproportion. How did that comment produce this? It didn’t. The comment just opened a door, and a year of tolerated conflict walked through it all at once.

To see why, start where we left off: a social system in equilibrium — a group of interacting people with no perceived deviations between them, a state of no conflict. It is a tidy picture. It is also one that cannot last, and the reason is simply that the members are alive.

People interact with their environment and with each other. They learn, grow, and change, and as they do, their knowledge, beliefs, values, wants, and needs all shift — and those are precisely the parameters that define a person’s equilibrium. So as each member changes, their equilibrium moves with them. They begin comparing what they perceive against a newly adopted set of beliefs. The same world, measured against a moved ruler, starts to read differently.

Now here is the part that makes equilibrium fragile. The odds that every member’s ruler moves in exactly the same way, at exactly the same time, are vanishingly small — and the more members in the system, the closer those odds slide toward zero. So sooner or later, someone perceives something that no longer fits their new equilibrium and reads it as discomforting. They perceive a deviation. They perceive, in other words, a conflict. And either they don’t look inward to learn a new equilibrium, or they try and fail. The gap stays open.

By Ashby’s rule — the whole is in equilibrium only if each part is — that is already enough. One member pushed out of their steady state, and the whole social system is out of its. It is a sobering thought: no social system stays in equilibrium for long.

The pressure before the dispute

Suppose the people who perceived the conflict have not yet acted. There is no dispute. The conflict is brewing underneath, out of sight. But their control systems are working hard the whole time — pushing them either back toward the old equilibrium, the one from before the conflict, or out toward a new one they can settle into.

People will tolerate a conflict, and keep their equilibrium, up to a point. But tolerance is not free. As long as the conflict sits there unresolved, the control mechanism keeps pushing to correct the deviation while the person keeps choosing to do nothing — and that standoff accumulates as stress. An internal battle, quietly compounding.

Eventually the pressure finds an outlet. The discharge can point inward or outward — depression or explosion, anxiety or mania, the whole range. The ones that concern us here are the outward kind, where the person engages someone else in some exchange of information to deal with the discomfort the conflict has caused.

And when no counterforce shows up to balance the perceived conflict, it crosses from tolerable to intolerable, and a dispute breaks out — between the person who perceived the conflict and whoever they hold responsible for it. This is the door opening. Once one person moves, every other member’s tolerated, internalized conflict suddenly has a way out and a reason to erupt. The first conflict, and all the quiet ones, had already pushed the system out of equilibrium. The dispute doesn’t create that state. It reveals it.

A social system out of equilibrium

A system out of equilibrium does one of two things: it tries to return to its old steady state, or it searches for a new one. Until it finds one, it is in turmoil — constantly moving, probing, shifting, looking for somewhere to settle.

A social system is no different, except that it is searching on many fronts at once. It is restless. Its members are each hunting for their own equilibrium, each trying to counteract the disturbance they feel and get back to rest.

The trouble is that they are doing this in the same space, on each other. What person A does to restore their own equilibrium can register to person B as a fresh deviation from theirs. So B acts to correct it — and B’s correction disturbs A right back. A affects B, B affects C and D, D affects A and C, and on it goes. Conflict creating conflict.

This is why, left unmanaged, a society’s equilibrium spirals: conflicts generating new conflicts at an accelerating rate, the way a few raised voices in a room recruit more. The operative phrase is left unmanaged. As I argued in “Why Cybernetics?”, the way to manage a system out of equilibrium is not to chase isolated problems one at a time. It is to treat the system as a whole and move it toward a state where all of its members can hold their own equilibrium at once.

Every complex system, ourselves included, runs on internal control mechanisms that manage perceived conflicts and hold the steady state — keeping blood sugar in range, speeding and slowing the heart, tipping the body into sleep. A social system is far harder to hold steady, because it is not one control mechanism. It is many, each pointed at a different equilibrium. For the whole to move out of conflict, the members in dispute have to learn to align their control mechanisms — to reach their own equilibrium alongside the others, not at their expense. There is no other route from conflict back to equilibrium.

Holding many equilibriums at once

So how does any system keep multiple equilibriums balanced at the same time? The human body is the standing miracle here — a dense web of interconnected sub-systems, each maintaining its own steady state while the whole stays in balance. How does it manage all those concurrent control loops, each chasing a different target?

Stafford Beer answered this in Diagnosing the System for Organizations. He calls such a thing a Viable System: a system of many interconnected sub-systems able to manage variety well enough to stay viable in a changing, often disturbing environment. Viable systems obey a specific set of principles, and his second one matters enormously for anyone managing conflict. The channels carrying information between sub-systems, Beer says, must each be able to transmit the relevant information faster than the sub-system sending it can generate it.

In plainer terms: the lines of communication need enough capacity to carry the right information, in full, in time. When they do, each sub-system has constant, current awareness of what it needs to hold its own equilibrium — including what the others are doing, and how its own decisions are landing on them. Total, timely awareness.

That principle lands directly on the mediation table. A dispute is a social system, and in it, each party’s actions are reshaping the others’ equilibrium in real time. So effective mediation depends on exactly the thing Beer described: every party needs constant awareness of how they are affecting the others, and how the others are affecting them. The mediator’s job, underneath everything else, is to keep correct information moving between the parties in time — so that awareness actually exists, and people can see what they are doing to each other.

We began with control loops and the notion of equilibrium. Now communication joins them, and the definition of cybernetics closes around the whole: control and communication in the animal and the machine. We now have a working picture of how disputes form, what drives them underneath, and how parties move each other. The next step is to look closely at the thing the mediator is really managing — the communication itself.

End Notes

[1] Examples: maintaining blood-sugar level, raising and lowering the heartbeat, speeding or slowing the metabolism, tipping the body into sleep.

References

• Ashby, W. R. (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics (Vol. 37). London: Chapman & Hall.
• Beer, S. (1985). Diagnosing the System for Organizations. Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
• Cloke, K. (2001). Mediating Dangerously: The Frontiers of Conflict Resolution [Kindle Version]. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.