Cybernetics, Integral, and Post-Issue Relationships

Cybernetics, coined by Norbert Wiener in the 1940s, is the study of how systems regulate themselves through feedback loops. It looks at communication and control in animals, machines, and organizations—how inputs, processes, and outputs interact, and how systems adjust their behavior based on the results they’re getting. It’s less about the hardware and more about patterns of information and feedback—who (or what) senses what, how signals travel, and how corrective actions are taken to reach a goal.

Anyone familiar with the Integral epistemology will recognize how cybernetics is a powerful lower right quadrant system—interobjective understanding of signals, responses, and communication patterns.

Why More Behavioral Options equals More Power

In a cybernetic sense, the “power” of an element in a system isn’t brute force but variety—the range of responses it can deploy. This idea comes from W. Ross Ashby’s “Law of Requisite Variety” (1956).

Only variety can absorb variety. This seems to be a universal principle in effective systems. Integral multiperspectival, interpersonal neurobiology’s response flexibility, and Greg Lester’s flexible and adaptive, are all examples of how effective systems expand options and encourage healthy adaptation. The world gives us many varieties of disturbances. If we don’t have more solution choices than disturbances, we’re in trouble. Only variety can absorb variety. 

Each step onward on any developmental line is more perspectives. This challenges us to continue expanding our range of responses by welcoming new realities emerging from our personal universe. 

If the environment (or other actors) can throw 10 different challenges at you, but you only have 3 possible reactions, you’ll be overwhelmed. If you have 12 ways to respond, you can neutralize, adapt to, or even leverage all the incoming variety.

So, the person with the largest behavioral repertoire—more ways of perceiving, reframing, acting, and adjusting—can shape outcomes rather than just react. In relationships, leadership, therapy, or politics, that flexibility shows up as greater influence, resilience, and problem-solving power.

Why productive self-awareness is so necessary. 

Insight needs action to have impact. Awareness of self, multiple options, and ongoing inquiry into what’s working and what’s not for the group and for you is necessary but not sufficient for effective impact. Awareness without action is impotent. Awareness with right action is assertive power.

Cybernetics and the four Core Qualities of relationship, leadership, and parenting—warmth, flexibility, adaptability, and resolve.

As we’ve explored in previous blogs, universal components of superior partners, leaders, parents, and lovers are warmth, flexibility, adaptability, and resolve. Here’s how they track with cybernetics and W. Ross Ashby’s principle of requisite variety:

When a leader or partner blends all four, they essentially maximize feedback quality(warmth), behavioral variety (flexibility), system stability (firmness), and teleology(resolve). That’s cybernetics in action.

Growth Hierarchies and Dominator Hierarchies

• Growth hierarchies thrive on variety. They encourage members to develop new capacities, voices, and roles — increasing the system’s “behavioral repertoire.” Leaders model and reward this by being warm, firm, flexible, and resolved.
• Dominator hierarchies suppress variety. Power concentrates in rigid commands, feedback channels are closed, and both leaders and members have fewer permissible responses — making the system more brittle and reactive. Dominator hierarchies are occasionally necessary (like a command structure in a combat unit) but are hazardous as primary systems.

A leader with greater behavioral options (more ways to listen, intervene, repair, and inspire) literally gives the group more cybernetic “bandwidth” to handle complexity. That’s why such leaders tend to create democratic, self-correcting cultures rather than authoritarian, failing ones.

The Practical Takeaway

Every time you train someone in:

• Active listening (more ways to take in feedback),
• Conflict repair skills (more ways to shift from rupture to connection),
• Polarity management (more ways to hold opposites),

…you’re increasing their variety in Ashby’s sense. That increases their power to steer relationships, teams, and communities toward growth rather than regression.

The Cybernetic Core of Post-Issue Relationships

Post-issue relationships are essentially self-correcting complex systems. A key feature of complexity theory is that more complex looks simpler and is more energy efficient. An iPhone has vastly more computing power than the computers used in the moon landings, has a tiny fraction of the energy requirements, and appears much simpler than previous devices. Post-issue relationships look easy—partners learn to notice feedback early, adjust behavior, and effortlessly re-establish connection rather than repeating old loops—but post-issue relationships are significantly more complex than conflicted relationships. 

In cybernetic terms, with post-issue relationships:

• Feedback loops become conscious (“We notice the first flicker of hurt or distance and name it”).
• Variety of response expands (Instead of stonewalling, criticizing, or withdrawing, I can breathe, ask for a hug, reach for compassionate understanding, or soften my tone).
• System goals shift from “winning” or “being right” to “returning to love.”

This is exactly Ashby’s Law of requisite variety in practice: the couple with more behavioral options (more ways to soothe, repair, and play) has more power to sustain intimacy.

The Four Qualities as Requisite Variety in Love

The warm–firm–flexible–resolved framework is a template for cultivating the variety needed in post-issue relationships and intentional love affairs:

An intentional love affair is conscious and mutually chosen —precisely a cybernetic upgrade from previous systems. Archaic unconscious loops leading to disconnection are transformed into deliberate feedback, variety, and clear resolve leading towards increasingly effortless love, passion, and fulfillment.

Check out this Shrink and Pundit episode I did with Jeff Salzman a while ago on post-issue relationships. You can see all these principles and qualities in action. https://www.dailyevolver.com/2021/08/post-issue-relationships/