In Their Own Words
Humour
“If a person says that 2 + 2 = 5, and another person says that 2 + 2 = 3, the ‘moderate’ politician will decide that the truth lies somewhere in the middle and conclude that 2 + 2 = 4.5.”
He used this to illustrate his frustration with political compromise that ignored mathematical and scientific reality. It poked fun at the idea that “the middle ground” is always the rational place to be. He saw humour as a functional necessity for his work because it acted as a stress-release valve, a cognitive-breaker to “jolt” people out of mental ruts and as a social lubricant for activism. And to deal with the absurdity of a global society in which humans had built a system capable of destroying the entire planet, and then call it “security” which for Alan was the ultimate, dark cosmic joke. His humor was his way of pointing out that “The emperor has no clothes.”
Professional Activities
Alan was a pioneer and activist transitioning from the world of bench chemistry to the rigorous scientific study of global peace. Alongside his wife, Hanna, he co-founded the Peace Research Institute–Dundas (PRI-D) in 1962, transforming their suburban Ontario home into a global hub for quantitative conflict analysis. Central to his work was the Peace Research Abstracts Journal, a monumental bibliographical project where he applied systematic information management to organize thousands of studies, aiming to provide policymakers with a factual feedback loop for decision-making.
He was a staunch advocate for Peace Science, a discipline that rejected purely emotional or ideological approaches to activism in favor of empirical data. His most significant contribution was the Tensiometer, a mathematical model that used a nation’s Gross National Product (GNP) and military expenditure to predict its likelihood of involvement in war. By treating the international community as a cybernetic system, he identified runaway arms races as positive feedback loops that required scientific intervention. Through his leadership in the World Federalist Movement and his Peace Research Summer Schools, Alan mentored generations of scholars, teaching them to apply Game Theory and systems thinking to the redesign of global governance. Ultimately, his career was a quest to prove that peace is a measurable, engineered state rather than a mere absence of conflict.
Contributions To Canada’s Systems Thinking Literacy
Alan introduced Canadian academia to the concept that peace could be studied as a quantifiable, dynamic system rather than just a moral or political aspiration.
- Methods training: Through the Peace Research Institute–Dundas, he trained a generation of Canadian students and researchers to use cybernetic models, feedback loops, and regression analysis to understand social instability.
- Information systems management: By creating the Peace Research Abstracts Journal, he taught the importance of systemic feedback, showing that a global system cannot function without a rigorous, organized memory of its own successes and failures.
- The Tensiometer: He popularized the use of predictive mathematical modeling in Canada, demonstrating how economic inputs and military outputs create measurable systemic tension.
- Institutional advocacy: Through his leadership in the World Federalist Movement, he promoted the idea of Global Systems Design advocating for a more logical, hierarchical structure for international governance.
Contributions To Canadian K-12 Education
Alan’s advocacy helped normalize peace research, leading provincial education ministries to integrate global citizenship, human rights, and international cooperation into Social Studies curricula during the Cold War.
- High school learning resources: Publications from his Peace Research Institute–Dundas (PRI-D) provided senior high school teachers with accessible, data-driven supplemental materials for world-issues courses, history classes, and debate programs.
- Educating future educators: By legitimizing Peace Studies in Canadian universities, he helped train generations of post-secondary students who became K-12 teachers, bringing his emphasis on systems thinking into primary and secondary classrooms.
- Restorative school cultures: His focus on predicting and de-escalating structural conflict informed the early peer-mediation and restorative justice models adopted by Canadian school boards to manage student conflict constructively.
Contributions To The Global Systems Thinking Discipline
Newcombe’s contributions to the global systems thinking discipline lie in his radical application of cybernetic principles and thermodynamic metaphors to the field of international relations. While many systems thinkers focused on biology or management, Newcombe treated the global community of nations as a single, integrated “macro-system.” His development of the Tensiometer was a landmark achievement; it provided a quantitative method for measuring systemic strain, treating national military budgets not as isolated policy choices but as variables in a global equilibrium. This allowed for the early identification of runaway positive feedback loops that signaled impending systemic failure, specifically war.
Newcombe revolutionized the global information architecture of peace research. By treating the world’s fragmented knowledge as a disorganized system with high entropy, he created the Peace Research Abstracts Journal to act as a central governor for the discipline. This professionalized the field, allowing researchers globally to access a unified feedback loop of data. His work in Game Theory also shifted the global discourse from blaming individual bad actors to analyzing bad structures, proving that systemic incentives often force rational actors into irrational conflicts. Through these activities, Newcombe helped move systems thinking from a theoretical framework into a predictive, applied science for human survival.
Individual Learning and Projects
Apart from the first appearance of the word Cybernetics in a book title in the late 1940’s, it wasn’t until the late 1960’s that publicly available books included the term Systems Thinking or Systems Science in the title. For the first wave of pioneers, beyond thought engagements with the authors in their Personal Learning Sources, Learner Activities were predominantly via living engagements with other people, in organised academia or independent scholars. This included 1) people studying General Systems Theory, 2) people working in the pioneer’s primary discipline, 3) people from other disciplines building interdisciplinary systems thinking skills, and 4) people wanting to stay in tune with the growing Systems Thinking community taking shape.
This text uses the word engagement to mean “active involvement and interest”. The term living engagements here includes spoken conversations with another person or group of people and written conversations in academic or professional organisation publications. The living engagement may have been supportive or disputational in nature.
The Projects of these pioneers could include teaching undergraduate university students, teaching and conducting research with graduate/post-graduate university students, or conducting research in learning institutes/foundations. Projects for some of them involved constructing an information sharing network enabling the interdisciplinary communication to occur, or working in diverse business, government and non-government organisations outside academia. Some pioneers chose to work as much as possible outside organised academia and conducted socioculturally impacting projects as independent scholars.
Anchoring themselves in stable spousal relationships and home life enabled each pioneer to sustain day-to-day wellbeing as they evolved their systems thinking skills over many decades. As lifelong learners they remained exceptionally productive and fulfilled in and outside the formal academic setting for much of their lives.
The learner activities and projects listed below are intended as starting points for deeper dives into the full network of people with whom they engaged and the projects they conducted.
Learner Activities
With whom did Alan engage more frequently in the ystems thinking community?
Alan’s engagements with the systems thinking community appear to be indirect through colleagues in his inter-related disciplines of regional science, peace science, and operations research. In these domains, Walter Isard and Paul Smoker were themselves linked to Anatol Rapoport, Kenneth Boulding and A.C. Pigou.
With whom did Alan engage more frequently in his discipline?
Paul Smoker
With whom did Alan engage more frequently from other disciplines?
Walter Isard
What role did Alan’s spouse play in his engagements?
Dr. Hanna Newcombe (nee Qualrova, or in Czech, Chvalová / Kvalová) was Alan’s primary intellectual partner, co-researcher, and institutional co-founder. Together their combined output bridged hard-science, quantitative modeling, and normative political theory. Alan and Hanna recognized early on that peace research suffered from disciplinary isolation. So they established and ran the essential bibliography and review journals for the discipline facilitating long-term engagement with top scholars across disciplines. Their dual presence amplified their network reach, allowing them to engage simultaneously with European peace researchers. Beyond academia both were active Quakers (Religious Society of Friends) and committed pacifists. Their joint spiritual and ethical commitments guided how they chose to engage with the scientific community such as prioritizing open data, peace advocacy, and bridge-building across the Cold War divide.
Projects
Towards the Development of an Inter-Nation Tensiometer (paper, 1970)
Studies on the Tensiometer (paper, Alan Newcombe, Frank F. Klassen, 1978)
Peace Research Institute – Dundas (established 1976, closed approx. 2000)
Peace Research Abstracts Journal (launched 1964, final volume published 2009)
Peace Research Reviews (launched 1967, final volume published 2003-2004)
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