Another group at MIT and Harvard University developed the notion of “organizational learning.” Chris Argyris and Donald Schön were the key figures in… - Stuart Umpleby

During the 1950s and 1960s most of the work which was called cybernetics tended to focus on control systems in engineering or on applications of the concept of feedback in fields ranging from mathematics to sociology. At the 1970 meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics in Philadelphia Heinz von Foerster sought to redirect attention to the original interests which had led to the founding of the field of cybernetics. In a paper titled "Cybernetics of Cybernetics" he made a distinction between first order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observed systems, and second order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observing systems.

A key location for the development of general systems theory was the University of Michigan’s Mental Health Research Institute (MHRI) where General Systems, the yearbook of the (SGSR) was based for many years. A mental health research institute may seem a peculiar place to find systems theory.

Systems science is generally said to have emerged during and after World War II, although there were precursors to the basic ideas. The people who created each school of thought were working largely independently, although many of them knew each other. They came from different disciplines, they were working on different problems, they formulated different variations of the principles of systems and cybernetics, and they often chose to affiliate with different academic societies.