A SciFi novel with the Viable System Model baked in.
When Sena, a systems thinker who reads cities like novels, inherits her mother’s unfinished work, she finds the life she thought she was living is a diagram—and one fold is missing. A fifth map.
Part mystery, part meditation on control and freedom, this novella unfolds Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model as lived experience: what it means to belong to a system, and what it costs to step outside.
A quiet, precise study of the architectures that govern us—and the price of choosing our own coordinates.
About the authors
Krishan Mathis is a consultant, author, and practitioner-scholar working at the intersection of management cybernetics, systems thinking, and organisational design. Through his practice, tautai, he helps organisations grow strategic adaptivity — navigating complexity without relying on prediction. He is the author of The Tautai Principle (2025) and Education is Broken (2026), and is publishing on human work in times of AI.
Margeret Heath is an independent researcher and self-described generalist whose inquiries centre on relational and interactive systems, cybernetics, and niche-construction processes. Her work investigates how dynamic, nested systems self-regulate and generate novel affordances amid uncertainty, with particular interest in distributed embodied social cognition and the collective playful imaginary. She pursues transdisciplinary collaborations toward regenerative futures and planetary flourishing.
Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s AI collaborator, was used in every phase of this book — research, drafting, revision, fact-checking, and production. The authors embrace these tools while reserving all decisions to human judgement. Used this way, AI enhances rather than restricts human agency; and where it takes over work, they take that as a reason to become more ambitious, not lazy.