**Pattern Name:** Governing System
**Introduction:** It is rare to hear anyone talk of governments as a human systems.
**Illustration:**
**CONTEXT:** Since most governments and almost all styles of governing are ancient, most people consider them as given. The choices are to move away or into a nation state. Rarely people aspire to overthrow a government by revolution.
Almost no one and no groups seriously aspire to **design a government as a system**, and a set of coherent subsystems. This is what is needed.
The situation that Forrester describes in the quotation at the head of this Chapter has changed little in the years since 1970, although now Piketty has gathered a considerable weight of evidence on the practice that has been tried and suggests in his book possibilities to investigate (Piketty 2020). I suggest that applying systemic logic should also be a guide on the path to better governing. A Governing System is a system to **regulate relationships**. Relationships are the interconnections between things, very much the subject matter of systems thinking. Governing is a process of **holding steady in a changing world**, and the subject matter of cybernetics, exactly as both Plato and Ampere envisioned. What is surprising is that this approach seems entirely absent from the literature on governing, even from most current writing. When I analyse the workings of the United Kingdom government, the one I know the best, it **accords to none of the three cybernetic laws**, nor with the best practice of ensuring the well-being of all citizens or achieving right relationship to the natural world. Human society and its 19 relationships to the **natural ecosystems of the planet** is a hugely complex system, therefore, it seems to me that any attempt to analyse and discuss governance in any conceptual system other than a process systemic conceptual system is doomed to failure.
**Homeostats** regulate relationships **from the "inside"**. We must understand the nature of homeostats.
**Initial Situation:**
**PROBLEM:**
**Forces:**
**THEREFORE (SOLUTION):**
**Actions:**
**Consequences:**
**Known Uses:**
**Examples:**
**Important Know-How:**
**CONNECTED PATTERNS:** **Supported Patterns:** **Supporting Patterns:**
**Notes:**