Editors’ Note: Genevieve Shaker and William Plater shine a light on a forgotten 1974 essay by the “polymath scientist” Heinz von Foerster on the cybernetics of philanthropy, exploring where it came from and what it anticipated, in a post based on their 2024 article in Philanthropia.

Far-ranging conversations were taking place in the 1960s and 70s around “cybernetics,” a complex set of multidisciplinary concepts dealing with systems and processes of change. Many philanthropic practices that have become familiar and well-understood owe a notional debt to cybernetics, including strategic philanthropy, systems-change philanthropy, effective altruism, trust-based philanthropy, participatory philanthropy, and reflexive philanthropy, each of which draws on shared concepts such as iterative learning, adaptive adjustment, acknowledgement of donor bias, and inclusive decision-making. Cybernetics also forms part of the conceptual underpinnings of the force likely to bring the most change of all to philanthropy—artificial intelligence (AI).

In a 2024 article published in Philanthropia, we explore one facet of this connection by rediscovering a prescient essay proposing the “cybernetics of philanthropy.” Written by a polymath scientist, Heinz von Foerster, the essay, Giving with a Purpose: The Cybernetics of Philanthropy, was originally published by the Center for a Voluntary Society in 1974. It applied then novel concepts of systems thinking that are now commonplace half a century later across dozens of domains, from science and technology to business and governance to health care and social services.

But what is “cybernetics” and why is its history relevant to philanthropy? In addressing that question, this post serves as a companion exploration of the historical context for the Philanthropia article. Fifty years later, as scholars and practitioners are grappling with very real concerns about how AI may impact philanthropy, we begin this essay with the emergence of cybernetics as the foundation for von Foerster’s historic paper.

A New Way of Thinking About Complexity, Communication, and Control

Early explorations and formulations of cybernetics occurred as a part of a specific set of transdisciplinary meetings focused on cybernetics from 1946 to 1953. These conversations were in turn a part of the wide-ranging  Macy Conferences, which were philanthropically funded, lasted from 1941 to 1960, and brought together scholars from different disciplines to promote cross-disciplinary interaction stimulated by emerging ideas about the implications of humans and machines sharing similar operating principles and mechanisms, among other intellectual experiments.

The ideas framing cybernetics were first widely identified as a named concept in Norbert Wiener’s 1948 book, Cybernetics: Or Communication and Control in the Animal and the Machine. In 1950, he published a more philosophical companion book, The Human Use of Human Beings, reflecting on possibilities and dangers of humans’ interaction with computers—and each other. 

The concept of a system of communication and control is itself very simple, but the implications for such systems are complex, diverse, highly theoretical, and yet quite functional and practical. The most common example given is the thermostat, through which a desired purpose (achieving a specified temperature) is achieved with information gleaned from the environment (current temperature) and communicated to an agent that can affect the environment (the furnace or air conditioner). 

As a field of inquiry and theorizing, cybernetics draws on foundational concepts but is not itself a single, independent and coherent discipline with defined methods, rigid definitions, or theoretical orthodoxy. Instead, it reflects its multidisciplinary origins and evolution through diverse disciplines with adjacent, transferable concepts growing out of the idea that any system’s components can be varied but all relate to each other to achieve a goal or purpose. The main point is understanding the relationships among the component parts of the system—and defining the system’s boundaries.

By 1969 the eventual emergence of AI from its common roots with cybernetics was being discussed at the “Wenner-Gren Foundation Symposium on Cognitive Studies and Artificial Intelligence Research” at the University of Chicago; a conversation again funded by philanthropy. One of the participants, Paul Weston, concluded that “there is still some distance to go before there will be machines with even child-like facility in the use of natural language.” 

Heinz von Foerster, the pioneering scientist and engineer who led the Wenner-Gren Foundation from 1963-1965, evolved in his theorizing from explorations of the 1940s to the more refined concepts of the early 1960s and beyond. This led to his playing the key role in defining second-order cybernetics, which he referred to as a “cybernetics of cybernetics,” thus using the initial lenses of observation to observe the observer, who enters the system “by stipulating his own purpose.” Paul Schroeder, an archivist of cybernetics and colleague of von Foerster’s in the 1970s, explained in a personal note to the authors that the move from first-order cybernetics to the second order marks a shift of emphasis from a cybernetics for control toward a cybernetics of participation.

While cybernetics observes how systems work from a perspective outside the system, von Foerster posed a perspective from within the system, an “observing system.” For philanthropic practice, this innovation implies that philanthropists cannot separate themselves from the system they are engaged in changing, thus opening possibilities for shared responsibility, reciprocity, and co-creation. His work at the Wenner-Gren Foundation played an important role in developing his theory because it gave him direct and practical experience in seeing how funding the work of anthropologists actually changed the culture or language they studied. In turn, he noted how the Foundation’s grantmaking was changed by each grant that it made as staff awarded new grants based on information gleaned from prior grants.  

One example of von Foerster’s applying his own theory to grantmaking was the process by which he determined funding for a 1968 symposium hosted by prominent anthropologist Gregory Bateson, “The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation.” He sought to use this self-awareness of the funder’s own participation to help in reflecting ethically on actions being taken and to recognize the value of the new knowledge, information, participation, and perspectives introduced by the observer for defining and acting on the challenge or problem.

As another consequence of his philanthropy work, von Foerster contributed to a theory of knowledge called radical constructivism, which posits that reality is not discovered but created through experience. For philanthropy, this theory dismisses more traditional top-down philanthropy based on expertise in favor of what is today called “participatory grantmaking” that depends on the contributions of the community being served and its own knowledge. These ideas support philanthropy by being more flexible and adaptable, allowing timely adjustments to changing circumstances.

Von Foerster published Giving with a Purpose in 1974, formally announcing a potential revolution for philanthropy and proposing a symbolic mathematical formulation for application. A prolific and respected author, he combined physics and philosophy in his research on a wide range of topics, always with attention to consequences for human beings and society.

Don’t Blame the System

For von Foerster, social cybernetics—reflecting a shift from technical applications to social and philosophical considerations—always implies human responsibility for inferences as well as actions. If cybernetics is based on massive amounts of existing information, second-order cybernetics allows for the responsible introduction of new information—and participation—by the observer. Responsibility rests with the observer due to their own relationship to information, knowledge, experience, and participation, not to the system.

The importance of cybernetics for philanthropy thus emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as second-order cybernetics, reflecting a turn away from technical and mathematical paradigms to apply the earlier concepts to social, ecological, moral, political, and philosophical systems. The implication is that the action supported by philanthropy is at least affected, if not determined, by what the observer/philanthropist already knows in defining the challenge to be addressed. Von Foerster’s contribution to this discussion was, in essence, making clear that the philanthropist is also a participant and not a detached, objective outside observer to the action or purpose of the gift, which he self-consciously demonstrated with the foundation grant to Bateson.

These ideas developed decades ago are enjoying a current resurgence of interest in Stafford Beer’s managerial cybernetics and in organizational cybernetics. The social uses that von Foerster imagined fifty years earlier clearly have practical, evolving applications for systems thinking in philanthropic “giving systems,” an aspect of his vision we discuss at length in our Philanthropia essay. Von Foerster was in contact with Beer intermittently from 1958 until mid-1970s, exchanging views on the social uses of cybernetics.[1]

From Cybernetics to Philanthropy

Why would a scientist-engineer-physicist directing the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign take time and focus away from hard science to address the hard problems of soft sciences, as von Foerster did? 

Von Foerster answers this question, in part, in a 1964 essay explaining why he accepted the presidency of the Wenner-Gren Foundation. An “honorary nephew” of Ludwig Wittgenstein and influenced by the “Vienna Circle,” he said he “wanted to learn more about the peculiar relation between the observer and the observed, by learning more about the observer.” Through his career of scientific study, he said he had “learned that we cannot understand the single element unless we see it as a part of a magnificent whole. Thus, if I want to know something about my ‘observer’—that is man—I have to see him as part of the whole—the family of man.” As already noted, his early motivation appears to have taken root in the Macy Conferences and evolved through second-order cybernetics into a belief that systems, like those used to create AI platforms today, have human beings—observers—as a necessary and responsible part.

In May 1973, in the midst of the Watergate hearings, Heinz von Foerster participated in a workshop in Washington, D.C. organized by the Center for a Voluntary Society. It was funded by the National Science Foundation based on a proposal written by David Horton Smith, the founder of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA). The workshop discussions were apparently the inspiration for von Foerster’s eventual essay. When invited to the workshop by the Center’s director, John Dixon, von Foerster—along with participants from government, foundations, policy centers, and scholars—was asked to prepare a statement of what he considered to be “the major, high-priority, policy-relevant needs-to-know for the voluntary sector.” Although he continued conversations with foundation and nonprofit officials, the essay that evolved from his workshop notes was his only known formal excursion into applying cybernetics to philanthropic practice in a published form.

Facing shifts in federal funding sources due to the restrictions of the 1970 Mansfield amendment focusing on grants with a direct military application, von Foerster’s laboratory was losing access to funding in 1974 largely because his cybernetics research centered on self-organizing and self-reflecting systems. Government and private funders favored instead the logical predictability of symbolic AI emerging at other major research centers after a split in theory in 1956. Having run out of funding, von Foerster’s laboratory closed by 1976.  His more humanistic approach to early AI development lost favor for decades until theories of neural networks now underlying contemporary AI revived interest in cybernetics and machine self-learning anticipated in cybernetics.

Prompted by political activism and legislative concerns, the famous Filer Commission’s  work, with its 86 research projects over 1973-75, provided the stage for von Foerster’s essay as a scientific approach to address the troubling issues ranging from Congressional legislation limiting foundations to disenfranchised communities whose needs were unrecognized and neglected. In his introduction to the essay, John Dixon wrote “Private philanthropy and charitable foundations, under attack as the balance of political and economic power changes, are being forced to justify their very existence. In the face of ambiguity, uncertainty and risk they are struggling to redefine their purposes and learn new responsibilities.” 

In a still relevant conclusion, von Foerster generalizes that “while a strategy of funding which tends to minimize uncertainty may increase donors’ feelings of security and even give it a record of flawless success, such a strategy will, at the same time, be counterproductive for an agency whose aim is to perceive new needs and problems in a changing society.”

Rockefeller Brothers and Cybernetics

Following the 1973 workshop, von Foerster engaged with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund with Dixon’s help, and he was invited by a senior program officer, Stephen Benedict, to present his ideas to the foundation staff in October of that year. As Benedict said in his letter of invitation, “we are all laymen in search of the cybernetic revolution’s implications” and “the elusive question of societal ‘values’ necessary to give meaning to any work.” Following the meeting, Benedict wrote von Foerster in November, saying “staff members who have spoken to me have expressed nothing but satisfaction and interest” and “I, for my part, plan to do everything I can, first to understand, and then to translate what we were talking about into some form of ‘reality’ that goes beyond our conversation.” By January of 1974, Benedict offered optimistically that the foundation’s trustees might give “some authorization to proceed with certain specific projects” even if not immediately and that he had “something more than hope that we will be collaborating in one way or another on some of these matters of deep common interest.”

By July, however, Benedict’s optimism had waned, and after reading Giving with a Purpose he confided to Dixon that despite his enormous admiration for von Foerster’s work, “experiential factors in the foundation game with which he is not closely familiar render his formulae suitable only for some breed of brain that we haven’t yet reached on the evolutionary ladder.” Not willing to give up, Dixon drafted a reply that he asked von Foerster to review, in which he makes the statement that, “the dollar in the case of philanthropy, unlike financial investments for profit, represents a unit of uncertainty” and urges Benedict to reflect this idea in his “policy for giving.” The analogy relies on the cybernetic principle that reducing an internal system’s uncertainty through information allows it to be more responsive and adaptive with whatever external uncertainties are encountered.

Despite an initial flirtation with cybernetics and its applicability to philanthropy, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s interest came up against the “experiential factors” of established foundation philanthropy. Dixon and von Foerster continued to be in contact, but the specific effort to engage a major, influential foundation in a new approach to giving had to await another era.

The Legacy

Cybernetics offered an early tool to make change purposefully, especially in philanthropic practice, by introducing new information, unfamiliar experiences, unheard voices, co-creation, thoughtful risk, uncertainty, shared responsibility, and flexible adaptability.

While there is no evidence that von Foerster’s model was ever considered as a practical system for giving by a foundation or philanthropist after the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s explorations, the issues have now been widely diffused throughout social and organizational paradigms as cybernetics itself has been diffused across professional practice in many domains. By whatever means, many of the hoped-for consequences of his concept have found their way into practice through participatory and technological approaches, including—for example—the Ford Foundation’s BUILD initiative that von Foerster would no doubt recognize and applaud. His formulation of second order cybernetics, which focuses on the observer’s role in a system, continues to influence the evolution of AI ‘s impact on philanthropy through such practices as reliance on adaptive feedback loops, prioritizing the human context in decision-making, checking for bias in algorithm applications, expansion of societal choices, and recognizing that funders are always a part of the human communities they support.

-Genevieve Shaker and William Plater

Genevieve Shaker is Professor of Philanthropic Studies and the Donald A. Campbell Chair in Fundraising Leadership at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at IU Indianapolis. William Plater is Chancellors Professor Emeritus of Philanthropic Studies, Public Policy, and English at Indiana University Indianapolis, where he served as Executive Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Faculties (1987-2006) and Dean of the School of Liberal Arts (1983-87).

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[1] There are several references to von Foerster’s interactions with scientific, nonprofit and foundation leaders, politicians, and scholars in this essay. Relevant reports, correspondence, and personal documents cited here may be found in the von Foerster papers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University Library archives, most of which have not been digitized and made available publicly. The authors express their appreciation to UIUC archivist Bethany Anderson and to American Society for Cybernetics archivist Paul Schroeder for their assistance in retrieving materials cited here from the archive.