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Learning to act systemically Professor Raul Espejo Director-General of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics Keynote Address at the 9th Brazilian Systems Conference Palmas, Tocantins, Brazil 22th October, 2013 This presentation will focus on learning how to overcome institutional fragmentation in the creation, regulation and implementation of business and social policies. The challenge is seeing the systems underpinning these policies. Developing this observational capacity helps diagnosing the structural shortcomings of current policy situations; improved observations makes it possible their diagnosis and this is a platform to design cohesive, viable, organisations. For learning to take place it is also necessary the implementation of these designs. Indeed, it is through this implementation that learning to act systemically may take place. Therefore, in addition to seeing systems, it is necessary to transform fragmented resources into cohesive organisational systems. It is necessary to make them happen. Seeing systems is circularly connected with making systems happen. Making them happen is a process of on-going problem solving, where individuals and organisations challenge policies at the same time that agree about these policies. Problem solving in this context is an on-going learning process where participants find ways of structuring the large complexities related to policy creation, implementation and regulation. I will argue that all this requires strategies to manage situational complexity. A hallmark of this management is people structuring problems (i.e. policies) in an ecosystem that is far more complex than they can deal with. It is beyond their collective capabilities and therefore the challenge is enabling these capabilities to transform the collectives in problem solving organisational systems. To support a deeper appreciation of this problem solving and learning I will discuss a systemic heuristic named ‘variety balance’ (Beer, 1979, Espejo and Reyes, 2011) to learn strategies for people to balance among themselves their inherently different complexities and to balance the complexities of organisational systems with their eco-systems. These are heuristics to learn to act systemically. S. Beer, 1979, The Heart of Enterprise, Wiley, Chichester R. Espejo and A. Reyes, 2011, Organizational Systems; Managing Complexity with the Viable System Model, Springer, Heidelberg.