Corporate Stockholm Syndrome

I’ve the pleasure to present at the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS).

The paper is titled Corporate Consilience: Operationalizing Systems Thinking in Enterprise Transformations in the AI Era.

The not-so-household-word “Consilience” comes from a late-1990s book by the polymath Edward O. Wilson. He argued that the fragmentation of scientific knowledge is largely artificial — and that the next leaps come from consilience, the unity of knowledge.

What I now argue is that this applies also to businesses. I call it Corporate Consilience.

🧱 Background. Organizations have always been architectures for managing information flow. From Roman administration to the modern enterprise, they evolved as coordination structures bounded by human cognition. The silos we live with — HR, Finance, Operations, IT, Data, AI — emerged within those limits. They were rational. They are no longer sufficient.

🧠 AI both breaks and builds. It is the first technology that requires coherent organizational context to be useful, and the first that can deliver it at superhuman scale. That inflection is Corporate Consilience: the deliberate practice of sustaining unity of knowledge across the corporation.

🖥️ Technology alone won’t do it. The missing layer is Orchestration Governance — a new function that breaks governance silos and makes organizational context queryable across data, processes, AI, architecture, and risk.

🪴 Its counterpart is Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model — specifically System 5, the policy-and-identity layer. AI finally makes it buildable. With it, continuous simulation and scenario analysis move from boardroom intuition into operational practice.

♨️ And it will be uncomfortable. Radical organizational transparency disrupts power in ways the postmodernists — Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida — wrote about for decades before anyone could build it. Orwell covers them, too: doublethink (aiming at a unified context BUT at the same time accepting that there in fact are many) is the daily discipline that keeps Consilience humane.

📖 On the bigger arc: this paper is the theoretical depth behind a practitioner-oriented book — Corporate Stockholm Syndrome, co-authored with Janne Vihervuori, out this autumn from Technics Publications.

Sincere thanks to those who shaped the argument. Professor Saku Mantere of McGill University offered kind guidance over pizza and beer — warning me off the trap of treating organizations as machines. (Heeded.) Dr. Ville Voipio and Dr. h.c. Risto Linturi brought sharp perspectives on the changing world. Dr. Ole Olesen-Bagneux’s emerging “metagrid” concept has shaped Corporate Consilience as a theory of convergence. And many others have helped structure the thinking.

ISSS was founded in the 1950s by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and his contemporaries. The 70th anniversary conference is held this June. To be among the speakers is, frankly, an immense honour.