A Viable System Model Approach to the Cybernetics of the Family
Allenna Leonard, Ph.D.
March 15, 2010
Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) is a tool to comprehend and to perhaps manage complexity. In cybernetics, we find it useful to discuss complexity using Ross Ashby’s term of variety – taken to represent the number of states a system can assume.
Family situations continue to become more complex as the world becomes ecologically, informationally and economically smaller and as the pace of change accelerates. The family is humanity’s most ancient structure for handling variety. Families work together to achieve common goals and buffer themselves against threats. Depending on culture and circumstances (particularly the levels of risk to survival) families develop different patterns of necessary and preferred balances between autonomy and cohesion.
From birth to old age, variety management combines measures directed to attenuation of variety and those directed to amplification. Attenuation includes protection from threats, filtering out the important from the unimportant and managing the flow of information, demands and expectations so that the individual is not overwhelmed. If there is too much attenuation, young members of the family lead constricted lives that shrink their potential and they may find it difficult to develop self-discipline and self-direction. Too little attenuation can, ironically, have the same effect. Amplification of variety includes the stimulation of everyday activities such as talking playing and physical exercise and seeking out opportunities for new knowledge and experiences.
The VSM may be useful both to families themselves and to employers, social scientists, and members of the helping professions who must, or at least should, take into account the opportunities and constraints accompanying the internal expectations and external demands upon the family. These include: the ‘big picture’ that includes families and the transactional and contextual environments they inhabit; serving as a check-up to identify gaps in activities or resources; to recalibrate family routines after a change in circumstances; to identify or clarify areas of conflict and to provide a viewpoint from a different perspective. Depending on the time available, one or more VSM’s of the family will be demonstrated