Governing Continuous Transformation: Re-framing the Strategy-Governance Conversation

all right hello and welcome everyone this is act inf org stream number 3.1 it's november 3rd 2022 our guest of honor is bijan herzi and we're really looking forward today to talking about the free energy principle active inference and your experience and recent work however for today you've requested that i set the stage with a little bit of context on some of the history and development of the active inference institute and by way of doing so set us up for a serendipitous collision in our paths centering around applied organizational active inference and the free energy principle so i connected with the co-founders of the active inference institute then the active inference lab which is what it was called until about june 2022 this year and we connected after hearing carl friston speak with lex fridman and got excited around some of the opportunities around this developing framework of active inference and the free energy principle the potential that a unifying framework could help us understand perception cognition and action across different kinds of complex and nested systems and then specifically applying those models in the context of especially remote teams and organizations and that resulted in our 2020 work active inference and behavior engineering for teams which additionally added in some systems engineering perspectives especially related to ontology life cycle perspective continuous delivery continuous integration and so on also drawing from an open science and an open source background and since then we've been on a journey we've been learning and applying active inference and our structure has developed today we're the active inference institute and we're working on some novel formalizations of our organizational structure and all these other important aspects of successful which is to say surviving organizations and organisms and that's what led us to find your work and immediately resonate with it as some of the finest contemporary examples of experience guided and shaped and situation tested cases of organizational active inference so that is how we came to be excited about this area and use the terms every day and use the ideas and the relationships in our strategy and to come across your work and see it as salient ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail When you want to ask actually, is there any support from a governance point of view, that's really when we started actually engaging because I always feel that in the area in particular not for profit, I like to pay my debts and support it. Now I do think that actually you're doing an incredible job. It's clearly still at a very early stage, which is actually equally true for the active inference movement in the respective sciences. So maybe for those who are in the audience not too familiar actually with what really active inference is about, it's really very philosophical and very scientific at the same time. There's a mathematical framework underlying it, which has been applied actually in machine learning and actually in Carl Fristen's work, which is the neuroimaging work. So it is not just a philosophical concept, but it is…