International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

The move toward a predefined result or goal.

Seeking convergence is very important in the management of concrete systems and specially in planning activities with a great number of intermediate stages, as for instance investment programs, construction of industrial complexes, development programs of any kind, research programs, etc… As shown by St. BEER, the successive interactions between the elements and/or subsystems can generally be modelized by a flow graph representing the "ramified system" (1966, Ch.9).

Convergence can be spontaneous, or not, as complex systems easily show chaotic behavior. A graph network flowing through the time dimension can be made less stochastic, but then only under the condition of the presence of an efficient control tending to diminish indeterminacy through the introduction of feedbacked information.

Failures to do so may become quite costly. BEER gives the following example: "It could thus happen, by a concatenation of… circumstances, that a two weeks delay encountered within the construction program itself might result (let us say) in a six-month postponement of the final completion. This outcome would be thanks to the ramification of the system concerned: it begins to act as an amplifier of delays" (p.192).

E. LASZLO equates convergence with the formation of catalytic hypercycles: "The outcome of convergence is a higher-level system that selectively disregards many details of the dynamics of its subsystems and imposes an internal constraint that forces the subsystems into a collective mode of functioning" (1987, p.34).

K. KRIPPENDORFF indicates the following social meaning for convergence: "The convergence model of communication postulates that as people communicate with each other they become more similar in knowledge and in attitudes and thus converge to form a homogeneous distribution" (1986, p.18). It should possibly be better to merely speak of a "more homogeneous distribution". Moreover, convergence can be obtained only through a well organized conversation.