Books
The Tautai Principle: A Book for Leaders Who Are Tired of Being Too Slow
An overview of The Tautai Principle: Growing the Adaptive Organization by Krishan Mathis. Why I wrote this book Most organizations […]
30.12.2025 More
Who Holds the Pen
Seven books put Stafford Beer\x27s Viable System Model to work, and each answers one question differently: who holds the pen? A comparison of seven VSM methods, a capstone choice guide, six showcases, and a coda on freedom and agency in the age of AI.
05.09.2026 More
Education is Broken: Human Work in Times of AI
An overview of Education is Broken: Human Work in Times of AI by Krishan Mathis. Why I wrote this book This book […]
29.07.2026 MoreArticles
From Agents to Viable Collectives: The VSM as a Diagnostic Framework
Krishan Mathis, Margeret Heath, and Panos Panagiotakopoulos. 2026. Preprint, CC-BY-4.0. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.22079120
Research on artificial intelligence agents commonly evaluates the capabilities, incentives, and interactions of individual agents. Yet increasingly consequential systems are not individual agents but collectives: ensembles of language-model agents, hybrid human–AI teams, and organizational arrangements in which observations, recommendations, decisions, and actions are distributed across…
05.09.2026 Download PDF MoreA Stress Test for the Viable System Model — A Cumulative Research Program
Krishan Mathis and Margeret Heath. 2026. Preprint, CC-BY-4.0. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.22752610
The Viable System Model (VSM) has been used for more than five decades to diagnose and design organizations under conditions of complexity. Its durability is often treated as evidence of its power. Yet the model's applications rarely specify in advance what observation would count against…
05.09.2026 Download PDF MoreHuman Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Krishan Mathis. 2026. From Controlling Technical Systems to Shaping Societal Capacity for Action
Current discourse on artificial intelligence (AI) is often shaped by two limitations. First, AI is framed as a technological competitor to human agency. Second, governance is treated primarily as the control of technical risks. This conceptual article proposes a different perspective. Its central question is…
19.07.2026 Download PDF MoreSocial Media
- Substack: The Tautai Net – and its sister publication Cybernetic Futures
- Medium: my Medium presence.