Foreword
Raul Espejo
(r.espejo@syncho.org)
Stafford Beer’s organisational cybernetics is making more sense today than at the time since
he published Brain of the Firm in 1972. Key ideas of the Viable System Model (VSM) such
as circular causality, complexity and structural recursion are being understood by a larger
number of people. The appreciation of Beer’s work is reflected by the increasing number of
blogs referring to his model and by the steady publication of new books and papers related to
organisational cybernetics in general and the Viable System Model (VSM) in particular. And,
indeed, Kybernetes has been a significant medium for some of these publications. Once more
this journal is offering its agency for the dissemination of this work.
The purpose of this publication, beyond disseminating Beer’s work, is making apparent work
in progress and possible future developments. In fact its purpose is not presenting the state of
the art in the application of the Viable System Model, but focusing on issues and research
possibilities that are emerging from current work. For this purpose we start with contributions
grounded in Beer’s seminal work in 1970s.
There are those who still get great value from the functionist interpretation of the model and
in fact in this publication we have four excellent contributions influenced by this
interpretation. The model is used to map the complexity of information flows within the
system and between this and its environment. Those focused on this interpretation are
particularly interested in diagnosing and designing the system through an assessment of
whether the capacities of communication channels are fit to purpose. Four contributions have
this emphasis and actually offer powerful and valuable insights; the contributions by
Christopher, Ben-Ali, and Achterbergh and Vriens take this approach. These are the first four
papers in this publication.
Christopher’s contribution explains the structural and managerial improvements that the
VSM achieves over the traditional chain of command -hierarchical structure- characteristic of
many companies today. In his view this model goes beyond recognising the need to
decentralise companies in business units, something that they already do, but clarifies the
information requirements to manage the increasing rate of complexity in today’s world. It is
particularly significant how he explains the transformation of an organisation chart into a
systemic model. His view is that in this transformation the fundamental structure remains
unchanged; what changes is how managers understand the company and how it works. For
instance, from this understanding mangers realise that their job is not running but designing
their organisation. At the core of his argument is a functional view of the VSM’s sub-systems
(i.e. Systems 1, 2, 3,4 and 5) and an emphasis in information flows.
Ben-Ali understands the VSM as a powerful template to design real-time information
systems. His paper explains the uncompleted, but impressive, implementation of such a
system for Libya's Youth and Sports Ministry in 2007. In carrying out this project he was
inspired by the Cybersyn Project in Chile, but now with all the technological progress that the
earlier project had not had. He also had the advantage of more recent methodological
developments, such as Checkland’s Soft System Methodology (Checkland 1981) and the
Viplan Method (Espejo and Bowling, 1996). He took a functional view and mapped the
Ministry and some other institutional resources onto the VSM, without questioning whether
the implied structural recursion was in fact happening. Just like in Chile he was assuming that
the real-time information system was going to strengthen the implied managerial levels and
induce structural recursion. Unfortunately he could not make the system operational as
political turmoil made the project not viable. However, the methods and tools he used in this
project are a contribution to our understanding of the implementation of the model.
Achterbergh and Vriens’ two contributions offer an approach for organisational design by
relating Beer’s VSM to the work of de Sitter (de Sitter et al 1997), a Dutch management
scientist. By recognising the complementarity of these works they are able to offer a powerful
approach for variety engineering. In this discussion they highlight the functional aspects of
Beer’s VSM. However, indeed, it can be argued that the VSM is more than a functional
description of complexity management. This is a key point in this publication that is
discussed further below.
Beyond the functional understanding of the model, other authors recognise its relevance as a
heuristic to work out strategies for fully fledged communications in effective organisations.
These authors are interested in organisational development and transformation and recognise
that the problem of communication is far more than the complexity managed through direct
interactions; it is also about self-reference and the related processes of self-regulation and
self-organisation. In their view people and organisations are not responding to stimuli as if
they were trivial machines (von Foerster, 1984). They are autonomous systems that
accommodate disturbances according to their histories and evolutionary contexts. Change and
transformation implies far more than individuals and organisational systems responding to
their representations of environmental complexity; it implies making sense of disturbances
through recurrent interactions (Espejo & Reyes, 2011). And no doubt accounting for these
communications requires a different epistemology to that focused on mapping institutional
resources onto the model and representing environmental variety. The papers by Garcia,
Espejo and Kuropatwa, Espejo and Mendiwelso-Bendek and Losscher illustrate this different
interpretation of organisational cybernetics in general and the VSM in particular.
Garcia and Mendoza, from the University of Santiago, Chile, offer an original paper focused
on managers that beyond their organisational roles are human beings. While it can be argued
that the components constituting an organisation are its roles and not the fully fledged
individuals, it is apparent that it is people with their own histories, emotions and affective
characteristics that participate in the relationships constituting that organisation.
Acknowledging this distinction makes it necessary for organisational participants to crisscross between their ontology, limited by their bodyhood (their integrated body/mind), and the
epistemic characteristics of their roles. In this paper the authors introduce and apply
CLEHES, a methodology for self-observation and observation of other participants, and
apply a second methodology –VIPLAN- to work out and improve the interactions and
communications of systemic roles in the organisation. The authors report the successful
application of both methodologies in a small information technology enterprise.
Espejo and Kurupatwa’s paper discusses the evolution of a company in Argentina with the
support of the Viable System Model and the Viplan Method. This company had had a
cybernetic intervention in the 1980s and in 2002 went out of business. The authors’ purpose
was revisiting the company with the lenses of current organisational cybernetics to find new
insights from its history. The 1980s intervention with the VSM assumed that the company’s
primary activities (i.e. autonomous units) were those implied by its mission, however current
recollections of its history question that assumption. These recollections suggest that this was
a very centralized company were corporate managers made extraordinary efforts to plan local
activities from the centre reducing businesses flexibility, making poor use of people’s
competencies and failing to produce a recursive organisation. Though a functionalist
application of the VSM may be helpful to highlight communication and information
requirements for viability, it yields limited insights about its actual viability. It is the
assessment of relationships within the organisation and with environmental agents that offers
these latter insights.
Espejo and Mendiwelso-Bendek’s paper is focused on stakeholders’ participation in policyprocesses in England. It continues with the theme of relationships and argues that for active
citizenship, which makes possible effective stakeholders’ influence on policy processes, it is
also necessary that policies are supported by effective organisational systems. Strengthening
citizens’ competencies is not enough to increase their influence in policy processes. National
and local governments’ services are the main communication channel between them and
stakeholders and if their implementation and policy processes are fragmented then the
stakeholders’ views about these services will not reach policy-makers. Thus, the argument
goes, to increase stakeholders’ influence it is necessary not only to increase their
competencies, but also to recognise institutional fragmentation and improve structural
communications. This argument is illustrated with reference to programmes for active
citizenship in the UK and an instance of the government’s inadequate response to a recurrent
service delivery failure.
Leadership is a key relationship in organisations; what is that makes a person a leader and
how can he/she benefit from an appreciation of variety engineering is the focus of Losscher’s
paper. Naturally leaders, as any other person, constitute amplifiers and attenuators of
complexity in their relations with other people. In this contribution Losscher uses Chemers’s
(2000) integration of image management, relations development and resource deployment as
the building blocks of leadership and reflects upon their meaning from the perspective of
variety engineering. His implied argument is that by mapping these blocks onto amplifiers
and attenuators of variety it should be possible to provide a platform to improve leadership
practices. Losscher interprets from the perspective of variety management aspects such as
building up responsible trust, making apparent a deep appreciation of the language of
complexity. This paper is an early attempt to observe leadership from the perspective of
complexity and opens the gates for further research in this important topic.
The focus of the contributions by Harwood and Ototsky and Manenkov is on the relevance of
organisational cybernetics on strategy and structure. They neither use the VSM in particular
situations nor attempt to explain it. Both have got insights from studying the model and in
their contributions discuss strategic issues; one for enterprises of any kind and the other for
regional government in Russia.
Harwood’s paper attempts to bridge business strategy and organisational cybernetics to
promote the view that they usefully enrich each other. The author is aware that little attention
is given to organisational cybernetics in main stream business strategy and wants to redress
this omission. The paper reviews on the one hand the Resource Based View of strategy, the
Strategy-as-Practice approach and the Strategy-Structure debate and on the other
organisational cybernetic concepts as contributors to an understanding of strategy. The paper
argues that being an organisation’s structure defined by its dynamically related resources, its
strategy is embodied in on-going relations and not in documents however smart they might
be, and recognises that this view of strategy depends on effective structures such as those
proposed by the VSM. This model provides a systemic heuristic for strategising. Harwood,
among other aspects, points at the complementarity of current work in dynamic capabilities
(Teece, 2007) and the VSM to promote synergy between business strategy and organisational
cybernetics. As an illustration of this complementarity the paper explains aspects of the VSM
that would enlighten a merger process between two companies.
Ototsky and Manenkov’s paper is a contribution of scientists from the Russian Academy of
Sciences that reflects on problems of complexity management. Though authors’ approach is
focused on mathematical modelling techniques, they make apparent that their interest goes
beyond subject-object modelling, that is, beyond modelling black-boxes as if they were trivial
machines, and focus on subject-subject modelling, that is, in on open modelling and
implementation techniques that involve stakeholders in intervention processes. In particular
the paper emphasises the role of Cognitive Centres, built along the lines of Stafford Beer’s
Operations Room in Chile and Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition. Though not
explicitly said in the paper it is possible to infer through their reference to the Cybernetic
(Viplan) Methodology that these centres are not there to forecast the future but to strengthen
social structures to increase their resilience in front of an increasing rate of change. Are
exiting social/organisational structures able to cope with this rate of change? They are using
epistemological and methodological tools grounded in systems thinking and organisational
cybernetics to build up effective cognitive centres at a regional level in Russia.
The emphasis of the final two papers in this publication is self-organisation. The first by
Espinosa et al discusses the complementarity between the VSM and complex adaptive
systems. The second, by Holten and Rosenkranz, explores the role of linguistic
communication for self-organisation. Both papers open the gates for new research in
organisational cybernetics.
Espinosa, Cardoso, Arcaute and Christensen’s paper reflects upon results of recent research
about the self-organisation of an Eco-community in Ireland. This community is currently
striving for its regeneration and improved sustainability. The paper explains the researchers’
empirical findings about the self organisation and self-transformation of this community, over
a period of several years, using a combination of the Viable Systems Model (Beer, 1979) and
Complex Adaptive Systems (e.g. Richardson, 2008). The paper describes the methodological
framework used to conduct the action research and reflects upon the complementarity of the
approaches used and the lessons learned in the process. In particular, by mapping the
organisational dynamics and the structural changes decided by the community members it
was possible to show interesting insights about emergence and self-organisation.
The contribution of Holten and Rosenkranz opens significant new grounds and avenues for
future research. They use the Viable System Model and linguistic predication to develop a
highly innovative framework to design amplifiers and attenuators of complexity in an
organisation. The VSM provides a way to understand an organisation’s communication
structures and linguistic predication provides a way to understand how to bridge
communication gaps between the different linguistic communities that are natural to any
organisation. These linguistic communities emerge from processes of self-organisation. The
challenge is enabling functional processes of self-organisation, consistent with the
organisation’s purposes, and for this the VSM offers design criteria. It is in this sense that
effective self-organization relies on designing effective structures. Most significantly, the
communication bridges are transducers relating actors with different functional
responsibilities within an organisation. Visualising these transducers helps designing variety
attenuation of operations and variety amplification of management to establish requisite
variety between systemic functions. For instance standardised languages permit meaningful
communications between functions with minimal exchange of symbols, decreasing the cost
of coordination. As the authors say this paper addresses the questions (1) to what extent the
design of amplifiers and attenuators is possible if these are realized based on linguistic
communication, and (2) whether this design can be automated in these cases. The paper
demonstrates that linguistic predication is not computable based on the model of the Turing
machine so that this operation is restricted to be carried out by human agents. In these cases
technology is limited to providing a technical means for communication and social processes.
Finally, it is useful to add a few additional words about the epistemological differences
between the functionist and communicative appreciations of the VSM. Indeed, it is different
to understand an organisation as a black box performing a transformation or as a human
communication system emerging from the structural couplings of actors and agents
(Maturana and Varela, 1992). However, these two interpretations are complementary; the
first, the black-box description, is necessary to work out systemic strategies to produce
whatever transformation an organisation is or wants performing; the second, the operational
(communicative) description, is necessary to work out strategies for learning and
transformation when change is desirable and necessary (Espejo and Reyes, 2011).
The black-box description helps seeing -through structural models- (Espejo & Bowling,
1996) constraints restricting the spaces for communications. The use of particular structural
models has implications for the chunking of the organisation’s complexity. It is extremely
difficult, if not impossible, to perform any significant task without its decomposition into
smaller self-contained tasks. This is the organisation’s unfolding of its complexity. However,
this chunking, if not done insightfully, can generate unnecessary fragmentation with
undesirable consequences. This happens when the systemic context for different chunks is
not recognised and is left to self-organisation without the benefit of designing necessary
relations to enhance their viability; this is a common problem for public policies. This
chunking can also generate fragmentation when the systemic context of the chunks is
recognised but managing their interdependencies is poorly designed and therefore becomes
too complex and costly. For instance, the traditional functional structure of companies leaves
the corporate level responsible for the integration of many relatively simple tasks, increasing
the risk, in a non-coercive situation, of a fragmented development of corporate functions. The
very complex network that is required at the corporate level to integrate the relatively simple
functional tasks becomes impossible or too costly. Once the network’s complexity exceeds
the organisation’s capacity to maintain its functions together, it risks fragmentation. This
problem is experienced by many companies as the complexity of their business
transformation grows. The alternatives are going either for complex networks of simple tasks
or for simple networks of complex tasks. This issue is clearly explained in Achterbergh and
Vriens contributions, and furthermore they offer a design heuristic based on de Sitter’s work,
which is powerful and of significance for organisational design. From a design perspective
this was the strategy used by many large corporations as they evolved towards structures
based on strategic business units.
Unfortunately, the black-box description is often equated with managers controlling the
organisation from the outside implying the traditional hierarchical organisational structure.
This description suggests structures that attenuate the complexity of their people so that they
comply with the views of those in power; these workers receive information to act but do not
construct their own meanings for their tasks. The ineffectiveness of this managerial approach
is illustrated for the enterprise SUR in Espejo and Kurupatwa’s paper. However the problem
with SUR was the relational strategies created by its owners within the company, and not the
fact that they had to chunk its business transformation in multiple ‘black boxes’ as is
illustrated in the paper. Designing this chunking is a fundamental strategy that de Sitter’s
approach and Espejo’s Viplan help doing. But, viability requires more than simple networks
of complex tasks (i.e. an effective chunking of the overall transformation); it requires for each
of these tasks relationships that allow their effective implementation and adaptation. This
kind of description is precisely the complementary operational description that is discussed
by Espejo both with Kurupatwa and Mendiwelso-Bendek in their contributions to this
publication.
An organisation’s operational description is better related to the structural couplings between
actors and between these and environmental agents. Are these couplings supporting the
autonomous unfolding of the organisation’s complexity? Are they supporting the
environmental stretching necessary for adaptation? Regulation in this case has a very
different connotation to a manager’s unilateral control of a black-box or an organisation’s
representing and responding to its environment; it is all about communications,
accommodation and mutual influence. However, the chunks produced by the black-box
description define the boundaries and constraints within which operational descriptions need
to be observed. We could say that this complementary description transforms black-boxes
into lively non-trivial machines (von Foerster, 1984), bubbling with complexity. For them
information is not enough for transparency; as argued before it is appreciating the quality, or
lack of it, of the necessary communications for viability that makes them transparent.
The scene is now set for readers to go through this publication. Any views about it are
welcome; I would be delighted to receive your comments.
Finally, I want to thank Professor Brian Rudall, the Editor in Chief of Kybernets, for his
invitation to produce this publication.
References
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