Address to the 2nd Cwarel Isaf Institute Conference
The VSM Applied to Complex Organizations in Crisis
Allenna Leonard, Ph.D.
The Complementary Set
allenna@allennaleonard.com
System 1
Last year, I went from St. Gallen to the see the Chilean exhibit that Enrique Rivera and Catalina Otta mounted at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. The immediacy of the exhibit and the reminder that this was about the people involved was striking. Although I was familiar with much of the material, what it hadn’t really conveyed was the sense of emotion and drama that gave the exhibit its punch. There was an operations room chair with the capacity to call up on-screen information. One was a black and white photo of the team magnified many times from the wallet size picture I knew. It showed the expressions of individuals who were joyfully embarking on a modern day quest to change the whole context of ‘politics is the art of the possible’. The hope and exuberance in Stafford’s handwritten ‘first paper’ almost jumped off the touch screen. I’m guessing that these feelings of joy and hope were widely shared.
These past months I’ve seen similar expressions on the faces of people who watched President Obama’s election and inauguration. Unfortunately, although Obama’s background as a community organizer suggests that he, like President Allende, may see himself as a representative of ‘el pueblo’, I don’t see any evidence of a Stafford Beer on the team with a model to pull his efforts together. While Obama’s appointments to the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency are scientists who appear to grasp the notion of systems in the natural world, his other appointments are remarkable for having gathered the best and the brightest from the ranks of conventional thinking, much of it straight from Harvard.
They are setting off in the 21st century on a perilous journey into uncharted wilderness, with the conceptual the tools and equipment available to 19th century explorers. But, do they know where they are going? Will they be able to cope? And, how far will their (and our) resources go if they don’t get it right the first time?
One of the lessons that has to be relearned periodically is that actions have consequences. This is doubly true when crises reappear despite numerous Cassandra warnings. With respect to the current financial mess, the most trenchant comment came during BBC coverage of the Davos Economic Forum where people from several prominent organizations repeated that it was completely unpredictable and they ‘didn’t see it coming’. A critic who thought they should said “no one wants to take the punch bowl away from the drunks at a party”. An apt remark, since there were plenty of red flags raised and many who didn’t share their tunnel vision trying to sound the alarm.
Stafford coined the word ‘culpabliss’ to stand for culpable ignorance of consequence. It used ‘culpa’ the Latin word for fault plus an acronym standing for Blind in Systems Sensibility. It may sound like a nicety today to talk about seeing around corners when so many people in power deliberately chose not to open their eyes to what lying straight ahead, but it is still worthwhile. Stafford’s remedy, having given up on decision makers, was to ask the free press to establish an accessible weekly ‘they should have known’ column to hold people to account for not taking steps to look at the consequences of their actions. It is ironic that the primary example of this today is not an effort by our esteemed 4th estate, but Jon Stewart’s Daily Show on the Comedy Central cable channel.
Stafford, like other Englishmen of his generation, was profoundly influenced by WWII. When he arrived at university as a sixteen year old, he was one of a small number of students. This gave him, as a philosophy major, access to Old English, new physics, mathematics, statistics and psychology. By his eighteenth birthday he was in the Army where he served with the Gurkhas, eventually being demobbed as Staff Captain Intelligence. His army work led him to apply his studies in mathematics and logic to what he later realized belonged to the new interdisciplinary field of operational research. In the course of the war, traditional thinking about defense had proved to be ineffective. With an enemy attacking, arguments for the status quo had very little weight and the new ideas of operational research were pursued with successful results.
This window remained open for a time after the war and operational research made its way into industry. Stafford joined a branch of United Steel, working first as a production controller. After reading Norbert Wiener’s book Cybernetics, he wrote to say, “I think I am a cybernetician”. This led to contacts and friendships in the field with Wiener himself, Warren McCulloch, Russell Ackoff and Heinz von Foerster in the United States and with Ross Ashby, Grey Walter, Gordon Pask and others in the UK. Eventually this led to his inaugurating a Department of Operational Research and Cybernetics employing seventy professionals at United Steel. While there, he began experiments mapping various properties of the human nervous system onto their industrial counterparts. You can see his electro-encephalogram of a steel mill and other artifacts in the Stafford Beer Collection at Liverpool John Moores University. Other experiments were documented in early papers, beginning in the 50’s. A number of these, including ‘the Cybernetic Factory’ the most complete early mathematical formulation of the VSM, are collected in the book “How Many Grapes Went Into the Wine” (Harnden, R. and Leonard, A. eds. 1994).
Ross Ashby’s work on requisite variety provided important insights to this early work. (Ashby, 1956) Ashby defined variety as the number of possible states of a system. The Conant-Ashby theorem is perhaps the best known and most succinct of his formulations. (Conant, R. and Ashby, W.R. 1970) It says every good regulator of a system must contain a model of that system’; that is to say; the regulator needs to have as much variety at its disposal as does the system to be regulated.
The simplest variety containment strategy is one-to-one, such as the eleven members of a football team ranged against eleven similar opponents. This makes for a good game but is unworkable in most situations, so a good regulatory model amplifies the variety of the regulator to a one-many ratio, sometimes through very simple structural designs that regulate group behavior. Traffic control is an everyday example: cars drive on the right or the left depending on location but it’s consistent and it works. Modeling approaches attenuate the variety of the system so that the model includes only those matters of interest to the regulator. ‘What’ is of interest depends on the situation, and how much can be left to a system’s capacity for self-organization.
Sometimes complex situations can be described by building out from one’s area of concern and looking at the policy implications. Stafford made hundreds, maybe thousands of models. He was especially fond of a process he diagramed in his yo-yo model. (Beer, 1966) In it, a metaphor between an organizational situation and a scientific one was tested to see if it was logically consistent enough to be a simile. If that worked, the next step was a homomorphic and perhaps an isomorphic mapping and a mathematical description. Models flow from distinctions; selections of characteristics important to the question at hand. Stafford said models aren’t ‘true’ or false; they are more or less useful, depending on the purpose of the person using it. A model airplane may or may not fly, while computer models of airplanes provide the specifications for their manufacture. A good model, for the purpose, has requisite variety and captures the salient relationships. An inadequate one lacks requisite variety and misses important aspects of the situation, often leading to unintended consequences.
Stafford was not known for turning a blind eye to the persistence of unintended consequences: “the purpose of a system is what it does” became one of his aphorisms. But, there is no point to building the model if it isn’t going to be used. There was a simulation model built to explore what would happen if a powerful hurricane hit New Orleans. It was called Hurricane Pamela. The model showed that there were no provisions to help or rescue most of the people in the path of the storm unless they had cars to escape and cash or credit cards to support themselves. The response was to pretend that message hadn’t been received. Of course, we all know what happened.
Cybernetic models differ from others in that they focus on relationships that are dynamic. Ross Ashby showed that only a few simple decision rules in a model could lead to complex interactions. Often they centered the maintenance of equilibria called homeostasis with the ‘mechanisms ‘referred to as homeostats. A complex organism, like the human body sustains itself through the operation of a great many homeostats. Body temperature, electrolyte balance, blood sugar and many others operate for the most part out of our conscious awareness although if they approach their limits, they may intrude on consciousness and the consequences can be serious.
Stafford was especially interested in the operation of homeostasis in human organizations. He postulated that the first consideration of an organism or an organization, such as a business or a city, was to survive. To do so required that its essential variables be maintained within acceptable limits. Often he was able to point to a single homeostat as a bellwether measure – if this aspect was in equilibrium, the rest of the situation would likely remain stable. He defined viability as able to maintain an independent existence. In the business world, that means selling a product or a service that a customer in its environment wants to buy for more than the cost of producing it. All the management structure in the business is there to support these transactions. This is the basis for his Viable System Model. (Beer, 1979, 1981, 1985) It describes the necessary conditions for viability.
A cybernetician defines crisis as when the homeostatic relationships governing one or more essential variables are overwhelmed and the variable goes into the danger zone. For many of us, our most direct experience of homeostasis is riding a bicycle. We make minute corrections on the straightaway and lean into turns. If we’re faced with gusty winds or slippery roads, we’re aware that we may over or under correct and lose our balance. When this happens, a default option - to dismount - is available to the rider. In the wider world default options are rare and crises don’t stay contained. Right now we are in the midst of a financial crisis but we have already seen spillovers into political crisis (governments in Iceland and Hungary falling) and main street economic crisis (ordinarily viable businesses going bust because they couldn’t access their normal lines of credit). Humanitarian, security and environmental crises lay around the next corner.
Perhaps the nub of the current crisis is lack of information that results in lack of confidence. No one can be sure that anyone knows how much toxic debt there is. It is as if the exterminators contract was cancelled some years ago and termites have eaten away at the beams supporting the house. No one knows if they will be stepping onto a solid surface that will support their weight or a spongy surface that will sending them crashing down to the foundations of the building. No wonder they are reluctant to enter.
Looking at the productivity indices and quantified flow charts that underpin applications of the VSM, we see little reliable information is available. There can be no measure of productivity if you can’t measure actuality, never mind capability and potentiality. But that information should be available and in real time or bogus real time too. No one can convince me that the bank that advertises that they calculate interest daily couldn’t keep and report other key indices. Public companies are required to report on a great many topics but the data often show up as aggregates rather than deviations from expectations and the quarterly report introduces some artificial thresholds that encourage decision-makers to distort results to make their numbers.
Stafford believed that no human issue was to complex to be addressed whether it was a company or a country. The trick, he said,was to look for the essential variables and their key homeostats that allowed a useful model to be built.
As a corollary, false trade-offs also need to be identified and refuted. One of the most pernicious today is the assumed inverse correlation between innovation and regulation. It is being trotted out to oppose devising regulations in accordance with Ashby’s Law. One would think that the unregulated capital markets had supported new inventions, innovative start-ups or R & D for sustainable development. As artists know, constraints often stimulate creativity. Think of the sonnet, or the haiku.
The Viable System Model, along with the real time indices, statistical filters, quantified flow charts, simulations and display functions as epitomized by the operations room provide a template for managing for viability. This obviously includes containing crises, whether sudden or creeping, as soon as their essential variables indicate a danger zone.
The Viable System Model
System One and Its Environment
Every system, often described by a circle, operates in an environment, described as an amoeba shape to denote that its boundaries are not fixed. It can be further divided by making distinctions between, say, the transactional environment and different aspects of the contextual environment such as the business environment, the natural environment and the social environment. The system is buffeted more or less strongly by events in the environment and it must have the capacity to adapt in order to cope with them. The success of that adaptation depends on the quality of the system’s intelligence about the environment and the resources available to make use of that intelligence. Management, whether by a set of bosses or by self-managed teams, is the function that metabolizes the intelligence about the environment and the energy of the system to act upon it. It is shown as a small square in the operation. The square needs to remain relatively small so that it does not use up the resources needed by the system to engage its environment. Note that this is the same function that is used by a single cell organism as it senses and moves toward a food source. It also has homeostats that attempt to keep essential variables – enough food, a comfortable temperature, etc. within healthy limits.
A business or a government is much more complex than a single cell organism. It has many more essential variables to consider and many more connections with its environment to monitor. The transactional environment of an organization includes its customers or clients, its suppliers, its regulators, its employees and its other stakeholders. Its contextual environment includes both direct influences like competitors and indirect influences such as credit availability, complementary technology and public taste. Stafford’s own applications of the VSM often showed environmental factors in some detail, including communications taking place wholly within the environment that affected the system. As recent events illustrate, turbulence in a contextual environment such as the financial markets can sometimes swamp local relationships and threaten their viability from afar.
A typical business makes several products or offers them in different markets. These operate in parallel, sharing more or less overlapping environments and stronger or weaker communications among them. Stafford called them System One activities. What makes them viable systems is that any of them could be sold off as an independent business and be viable on its own. Since they each maintain relations with their own particular environments, they are closest to the action and do best when they can exercise autonomy in meeting the demands they see in their markets.
The homeostat that balances the operations with their markets along the horizontal axis of the model is the first aggregate homeostat in the VSM.
System Two
However, that autonomy has limits. Any time you have two or more activities being operated together, the possibility exists for them to get out of synch with each other or get in each other’s way, leading to oscillation in the larger system. A System Two exists as a service to damp this oscillation and to coordinate common services for consistency and efficiency. Here’s a short list of the services in a complex organization that may come under System Two:
Access for disabled persons
Accounts payable
Accounts receivable
Catering
Certifications
Cleaning/janitorial
Courtesy expectations
Diversity promotion
Documentation
Dress code
Employee assistance and benefit programmes
Employee handbooks
Energy efficiency
Hazardous materials rules and procedures
House style
Insurance
IT facilities
Landscaping
Maintenance
Mailroom
Orientation
Parking
Personnel
Printing
Purchasing
Recycling
Safety
Scheduling of common facilities
Security
Tax compliance
Telephone networks
Training in existing practices
Travel
Use of shipping and handling facilities
Vacation schedules
There are several things to note about this list. First, none of these activities earns a penny, although doing them efficiently rather than inefficiently may save money. Second, depending on particular circumstances, most organizations of any size will be engaged in most of them, and perhaps others as well. They do not, after they are established, require much in the way of executive attention unless there is a radical change in the situation. They exist so that things run smoothly. Some are mechanical, some administrative, some physical, some formal, and some informal but together they absorb a lot of variety so that people have commonly understood expectations of one another and don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Finally, none of them are viable systems in their own right for this organization, although in these days of outsourcing, provision of some of these services, like catering, cleaning or security, might be viable systems in someone else’s company.
System Three
There are executive functions and decisions to be made, given that this particular organization has more than one operation. The viable organization should be run in the interests of the whole, which may not always be the most advantageous for one or more of the parts at any given time. This circumstance leads to resource bargaining among the parts so that demands can be met, opportunities seized or threats avoided. In one’s body, this resource allocation usually happens smoothly. More blood flow is directed to the legs when running and to the stomach when digesting a big meal. Also, an organism typically attempts to build some resilience so that it has a buffer if food is scarce. This appreciation of ‘slack’ isn’t necessarily duplicated in an organization. Redundancy is not examined closely to see if it is resilience or waste. There may also be competition among the parts for resources of management attention, additional personnel, finances and advertising campaigns. Furthermore, there are laws that must be complied with and contracts that must be negotiated and honoured. Management accounting, budgeting and production control are typical of functions provided by System Three.
System Three Star
From time to time, System Three will see a need to probe more deeply into System One operations to satisfy particular needs or to cope with a disaster like a flood or a blackout. System Three Star fulfills this need for an audit channel that can delve into detail without taking over and micro managing. The financial audit is the most obvious example, but there could be an energy audit, a security audit, an IT compatibility audit, a study of customer complaints etc.. Sporadic employee satisfaction surveys and needs analyses are other examples.
Taken together, the management functions of Systems One, Two, Three and Three Star account for the inside and now of an organization, operating in the present tense. Note that the only direct connection to the environment exists in the linkage between it and the System One operations. Note also that these are functions, not names on an organization chart. It is possible, even likely, that an individual could play a role in delivering a product or a service to a customer and in managing that operation. System Three often includes representatives from the management at System One and almost everyone enacts roles in System Two, at least by observing the protocols.
System Four
Although time lines vary from seconds to decades, organisms and organizations need some capacity to anticipate the future and prepare for it. System Four’s role is to observe the anticipated future environment and its own states of adaptiveness and act to bring them into harmony. To do so, it must also have a clear picture of System Three’s present state so it can offer alternative paths from the present to the future. Changes in the natural, social, economic, technological and political environments and their interactions determine the conditions that the organization must be ready to face if it is to survive. An organization must keep its information about future developments flowing and must act internally to be ready for them. This doesn’t just involve working to improve present products. Remember that no amount of improvement in the manufacture of buggy whips could stand against the introduction of the automobile. Developing new products is necessary to meet the needs of emerging markets. Recruitment, staff development, benchmarking, participation in trade shows and conferences, credit negotiations, market research and lobbying are concerned with learning about and affecting the outside and future. Research and development, strategic planning, borrowing policies and marketing use that knowledge to make internal modifications to be ready for coming changes. An effective System Four engages in continuous dialogue between its model of the anticipated future and its model of itself.
The Three/Four Homeostat
Maintaining a good balance between System Three’s concern with the day to day running of affairs and System Four’s concentration on the anticipated future is a challenge for every organization. It is difficult, because the balance isn’t the same for every organization, the same organization at every time or every part of the same organization. A great deal depends on the rapidity of technological advance and changing tastes in each industry. For the high tech world, getting the first working prototype developed and to market means that the proportion of energy directed toward System Four will be high. In a mature industry, such as forestry, supply and demand might remain fairly constant for years – until a new insect arrives on the scene or tariffs make exports uncompetitive.
As a general rule, Stafford mapped out trajectories for new products along an S curve. One had to have technology B up and ready to go as the demand for technology A began to flatten. His use of real-time monitoring of key indices was another way of keeping alert to changes. If each System One reported on around ten measures each day, then the time series could be mapped and examined using statistical filtration techniques. If they were all within expected ranges, operations continued as normal. If a value was recorded that was out of range, then it would be examined carefully. Some would be recording errors, random variations or transients. Others would represent slope or step changes in that index requiring immediate attention. Selecting and tuning the indices to be monitored required a good knowledge of how the system worked – usually a VSM.
Here, we can reflect on our own experience of going for a basic medical check-up. If no concerns are raised, a relatively small number of measurements are made: weight, blood pressure, temperature and blood tests for diabetes, anemia and cholesterol. Eyes and ears are examined and abdomens pressed. If everything is ‘normal’ no further tests are done but if not, that aspect is pursued in more detail.
The Three/Four Homeostat is the second of the three important aggregate homeostats in the VSM.
System Five
Closure is provided by System Five. Its active job is to monitor and adjust the Three/Four Homeostat. Its broader function embodies ethos and coherence and underwrites the viability of the whole. An organization is faced with many requirements for choices and decisions, and some technical help is available to make good ones. This is where the emphasis is on doing the right thing rather than doing things right. But, all ‘good’ choices aren’t good for or compatible in every organization. Even doing the ‘right’ thing for reasons that are wrong or unclear puts an organization at risk of mission creep or internal inconsistency. Questions such as ‘what business are we in?’ or ‘who are our clients?’ must be asked continually to avoid losing touch with oneself and one’s markets. Today, organizations are making products while busily researching their transitions to a service economy. To be sure, much of the actual exploration is carried out in System Four, but its work has to be consistent with the evolving identity of the organization. In times of crisis, organizational values are tested. Do they walk the talk or use government bailout money to give million dollar bonuses to executives while making employees redundant?
A weak System Five will collapse (along with System Four) into System Three; depriving the organization of its ability to act with intelligence. Stafford likened this phenomenon to of a that of a cat operating on the basis of its spinal chord. The other problem System Five faces is to balance being asleep at the wheel verses jumping at every sound. Here’s where the algedonic signal comes in signaling a threat or an opportunity that says ‘drop everything and attend to this’. It too must be tuned.
Taken together, the organization’s Five/Four/Three represents the metasystem of the One/Two/Three present activities.
All the management functions, One through Five, represent the vertical variety management that balances the horizontal variety between the System Ones and their environments. This is the last important aggregate homeostat in the VSM.
Recursion
Perhaps the most useful feature of the VSM is that its structure and communications channels are repeated from the smallest productive unit to the largest. It is a recursive model in which parts are nested within the whole like a series of Russian dolls. This allows for a great deal of economy in the analysis as well as easy comparisons among System One through Five’s activities along both horizontal and vertical lines. By convention, the most comprehensive recursion is referred to as recursion zero and subsystems by one, two, etc. If we think back to the list of activities under the heading of System Two, we will see that they attach to different levels in the VSM. Functions like security, common use of meeting rooms or loading docks are likely to be site specific. Others such as accounting, branding, recordkeeping, tax compliance and personnel functions are often done in common across the whole legal boundary of the organization, although some sensitivity to local variety is needed. Questions should be frequently asked about whether the location of these administrative functions is appropriate under changing conditions or when operations are initiated in new jurisdictions or with different types of employees.
The General Picture
Although I’ve been talking so far about organizations in the business world, government, non-profit and informal or non-institutional providers of goods and services share similar concerns with a larger number of variables and broader criteria of success. The examples so far have also concentrated on organizations with a single legal boundary but that is not necessary and many participants contribute to the viability of larger entities up to and including whole countries.
The Work in Chile
In 1970 Stafford received an invitation from President Salvador Allende, the newly elected socialist president of Chile. The assignment led to his becoming scientific director of an effort to organize the social economy of the country and to advance Allende’s agenda of a peaceful road to socialism which included production directed to filling the needs of citizens, worker participation in decision making and resilience against external buffeting. The project was called Cybersyn for cybernetic synergy. The life of the project was less than two years from its initiation to the overthrow of the Allende government. Despite its short life, rapid progress was made on realizing Allende’s goals of integrating the national economy and learning how to make worker participation a reality. (Medina, 2006)
Chile at that time, like many Latin American countries, historically had a large state-owned sector of the economy, supplying energy, products of heavy industry and transportation. This occurred because the scale of operations was not large enough to make investments there profitable for private concerns but too broad to be satisfied by what small producers might provide. These were grouped under an entity called CORFO. When Allende nationalized additional sectors of industry, their management was brought under the CORFO umbrella at a rapid rate. (Schwember, 1977)
There were several features of the project. The first was the use of the VSM. Twelve levels of recursion were identified from the individual worker to the country as a whole. In practice, Cybersyn focused on the levels of the product line, the sector, the branch, (there were four – perishable consumables, non-perishable consumables, heavy industry and machinery) and CORFU itself. For prototyping purposes some firms were modeled and training was piloted for firms to provide meaningful worker information and participation and to differentiate between their roles and knowledge bases and those of the experts.
The project was supported by a process whereby information came into a central location via a network called cybernet (eventually to the operations room), using a statistical filtration package called Cyberstride and in the framework of Checo (the plan).
Cybersyn wasn’t only a technical project. Stafford wrote up and made some experiments in participation that later led to the development of his Team Syntegrity process. Folk singers and artists were approached for their contributions to the vision of the Allende government. Stafford and Angel Parra collaborated on an initial effort – a song called ‘Litany for a Computer and a Baby About to Be Born’.
Much of what would be considered standard operational research was included too. Quantified flow charts were prepared for a given product line from the raw materials, production processes, containers and order fulfillment to distribution to the customer.
From six to twelve indices were established for each product line. Values that were outside the normal range were fed from the System One units to System Three for examination. The determination that they were out of range was made by a set of programs based on the Bayesian statistics of Harrison and Stevens. Systems One to Three had a time period within which to address the changes. If the issue could not be resolved within that time, that was an indication that a more comprehensive picture was needed and it was fed up to the next level. In this way, issues like shortages could be addressed for the whole product line and supplies moved around among them.
An operations room facilitated oversight at System Five. This was, literally a room with from seven to ten chairs where decision makers could meet. Its walls had multiple screens: some showed its VSM, at several levels of recursion; another set contained data from quantified flow charts; a third held outputs from various indicators and a fourth had Forrester’s Dynamo output. Additional displays showed maps and pictures of facilities and computer plots of trends.
Information was fed to the operations room on a daily basis – what Stafford called bogus real time. Erroneous reporting afterward stated that this couldn’t have been accomplished because the Chileans could not have constructed a sufficiently large data bank. The economy of Cybersyn was that it didn’t require a data bank. Only ‘out of normal range’ results from ten or so indices at each level were reported. Some of the data from remote areas actually traveled to a telex machine by donkey. All this is a reminder that intention and ingenuity can accomplish a great deal.
All these processes were focused on Systems One to Three. System Four ran in two tracks. The traditional planning processes were continued while experiments were made with Forrester’s System Dynamics. The experiments with Dynamo were not conclusive for two reasons. The whole Chilean situation was changing too fast along too many parameters and the experiments were cut short by the coup.
Despite difficulties, the project enjoyed considerable success. Stafford later wondered if it had been too successful. The government had, because of its superior information handling capacity, survived a small business (gremio) strike, massive shortages and other perturbations. Because the team did have ‘information’ the attempt to bring down the government by withholding critical supplies failed. This was because, as in any modern state, there is a lot of excess capacity in warehouses, depots, rail yards and so on. This meant that in a crisis, there was resilience and redundancy in the system that could be marshaled to make sure that imposed shortages didn’t rise from inconvenience to threat. This may have contributed to the high level of bloodshed that followed in the CIA inspired coup. The extent of violence was a surprise; it had not been part of Chilean history before.
The Cybersyn project remains today the broadest application of cybernetics to government and the management of affairs. No country since has been so willing to try such an innovative approach. It took a strong sense of purpose and a willingness to leapfrog over traditional ways of doing things.
Conclusion
Making the world work for everyone, as W. Buckminster Fuller advocated, is a distant goal. Resource disparity within and among countries has grown. There is nowhere near the capacity required to respond to predicted levels of ecological crises and their associated social upheaval. In troubled regions, conflict and post-conflict states continue to seek equilibrium using low variety models of their situations and their historical antecedents. A high proportion of our system problems from the local to the global level are only partially addressed by official bodies with traditional lines of authority. Even if the authority is there, lack of communication between the ministry silos means that the first crossover point is usually at the top - the prime minister or the president. That person, no matter how able, is limited by a human being’s innate channel capacity. 21st century means, including Syntegration and the Vester Sensitivity Model can connect people and perspectives and create a framework.
An information hierarchy based on comprehensiveness is needed and could be implemented at multiple levels of recursion using the VSM. Much of the information is already gathered and needs only to be integrated. How often, from the vulnerability of New Orleans to the Madoff Ponzi scheme, has the crucial information been available sitting on a shelf or lying in a whistle blower’s file? Some new regulations, especially in the financial sector, are needed. But, a great deal of information, dealing with public utilities, security, public health, infrastructure maintenance and the standard reporting requirements of public companies is already gathered. But, since our societies are whole systems, its effectiveness is limited unless it is put together. It is unnecessarily difficult to see how circumstances in one area affect others. As a result, homeostats are not in place to indicate incipient instability- and crises occur. Now is certainly a time to try to communicate how useful and necessary our tools can be.
So, the first tool I’d pack if I had the chance to outfit Obama’s expedition – or those of his counterparts in Europe– or elsewhere - would be the Viable System Model, along with the conceptual apparatus that underpins it and the information handling tools that accompany it. This was what was available to Project Cybersyn. This is what just might make the difference between struggling through tough times and collapse.
References
Beer, S. (1966) Decision and Control. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, P. 118.
Beer, S. (1975) ‘Fanfare for effective freedom’ in Platform for Change. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 421-453.
Beer, S. (1979) ‘ In search of health’. Unpublished report.
Beer, S. (1981) Brain of the Firm, 2nd Ed. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons,
Beer, S. (1985) Diagnosing the System for Organizations. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Beer, S. (1989) ‘ National government: disseminated regulation in real time or ‘How to run a country’ in Espejo, R. and Harndon, R. Eds. The Viable System Model: Interpretations and Applications of Stafford Beer’s VSM. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons
Beer, S. (1994) ‘The Cybernetic Factory’ In Harnden, R. and Leonard, A. Eds. How Many Grapes Went into the Wine. Chichester, Joh. International Journal of Systems Science n Wiley & Sons.
Conant, R. and Ashby, W.R. (1970) ‘Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system’, Vol. 1. # 2 pp. 89-97.
McCulloch, W.S. (1989) Collected Works, Ed. R.McCulloch. Salinas, CA: Intersystems
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Medina, E. (2006) ‘Desiging freedom, regulating a nation: socialist cybernetics in Allende’s Chile’. In Journal of Latin American Studies Vol. 38. Pp 571-606.
Pert, C. (1997) Molecules of Emotion. New York: Scribner.
Schwember (1977) ‘Cybernetics in government: experience with new tools for management in Chile 1971-1973’. In H. Bossel, Ed. Concepts and Tools of Computer Based Policy Analysis, Vol. 1. Basel, pp. 136.