Orienting Reflex
Sensing before knowing
Before we can name what is happening, something in us has already turned toward it. Orienting Reflex is a set of instruments, a book and a practice for widening that first sensing, in the clinic, in organisations and in society, and for carrying it through to anticipation and action.
“What is it?”
Pavlov called it the “what-is-it?” reflex: the whole-body turn towards something new, before we know what it is. Sokolov showed how precise it is. It fires at novelty, and also when something expected fails to arrive or arrives too early, so the body senses when as well as what. It fades as the nervous system’s model of a thing improves, and returns when that model fails.
Ross Ashby’s homeostat has two loops: one holds a system steady, the second reorganises it when a limit is breached. Orienting needs a third loop. It holds a model of what should come and when, fires on a mismatch in either, and its first act is not to respond but to turn towards, widening the channels of sensing before any judgement of harm. We hold this as our extension of Ashby, a claim to be tested.
A system that can only regulate and reorganise meets novelty as damage; a system that can orient meets it as news.
Our work is about increasing the variety of sensing in systems at every level, drawing on the cybernetic tradition of Ashby, Pask and Beer, on the biology of the extracellular matrix and on practical knowing.
The 4W&T system
Four instruments for conversation and one for anticipation, built on Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory, with what is learned held in a living knowledge mesh.
Wellspring
Meeting what is sensed before it can be said. A space for the pre-articulate.
Workbench
A practitioner and a partner draw out knowing that lives in hands and habits, and test it by teachback.
Workshop
Shared sense-making across perspectives, where a group finds what none of its members held alone.
Wayfinder
Finding a way through what has been learned, and knowing when you have reached its edge.
Transducer
After Robert Rosen’s anticipatory systems: carrying what has been sensed forward into models of what is coming, and into practical application in the clinic, the organisation and beyond.
How we work
Orienting Reflex begins as a joint venture between the United States and the United Kingdom, drawing on the English cybernetic tradition of Ashby, Pask and Beer and the American tradition that grew up alongside it.
Gordon Pask built machines to converse with, from Musicolour in the 1950s to THOUGHTSTICKER in the 1970s: partners in learning, not substitutes for it. We work in that tradition. Our conversations are recorded and transcribed, and a range of large language models help us structure what was said, draft, find and check sources, and build the knowledge mesh. This is not an anti-AI project; the question is what has to stay intact in the person holding the tool, so that they can tell when the output appears to be inaccurate. What the models cannot do is orient. Every draft is taught back by the person whose knowing it claims to hold, without the page, and corrected wherever the two differ.
Where the material is sensitive, the same process runs on open-weight models hosted in your own country, or entirely on your own premises, so that your data stays sovereign and never leaves your control.
We work in English first. But sensing is shaped by language and culture, and what counts as noticing in one place may pass unseen in another. We welcome partners who want to develop this work in other countries, regions and languages, in their own terms rather than ours.
Knowing Before the Word
Written in conversation by an osteopath, a cybernetician from policing and security, and a learning architect. A ‑nosis is a condition diagnosed from outside; a ‑gnosis is knowing from inside the knowing. The book’s claim is that this is one reflex at three scales, with the same structure, the same way of going wrong and, now, the same emergency.
Biognosis
The knowing of the living body: what the hand knows before the mind names it.
Organognosis
The knowing of the organised whole: how a practice or an institution senses its own coherence.
Sociognosis
The knowing of the social field: how a profession or a nation feels what is coming before it can say what it is.
Ways in
Thinking in public
Draft passages, open disagreements and practices to try, as the book develops. Latest: What Is It? The first move, before the word, and the third loop the homeostat never had.
Subscribe on SubstackConversations
Recorded conversations, talks and demonstrations of the instruments at work.
Watch on YouTubeWorking with us
The 4W&T instruments with practitioners, teams and leaders: professional development for clinicians, and programmes for organisations facing complex challenges.
Start a conversationThree perspectives
Steve Hewitt
Osteopath of thirty-five years, Ledbury Osteopathic Practice.
Richard Berry
Cybernetician from policing and security, working across innovation, research and public service.
Peter Tuddenham
Learning architect in Gordon Pask’s tradition. Co-Founder, College of Exploration; President, Cybernetics Society.