Platform for Change

1975 · John Wiley, London · abbreviated PFC throughout this wiki.

The manuscript’s own account of the work: Platform for Change is not a conventional book. Beer writes in grouped lines rather than prose to cut “verbiage” and “pinpoint ideas” — “No, it isn’t meant to be poetry” (PFC 1975: 2). The pages are colour-coded: narrative pages comment on the Arguments of Change, printed on white pages, each Argument “an aspect of a wider case” (PFC 1975: 10). The Arguments are lectures and papers from 1969 to 1973, most from 1970; the wider case is set out in eight Thesis statements, presented “in a colour of its own” (PFC 1975: 10). The manuscript calls the Theses “the most compact statement of Beer’s social cybernetics of that period”.

Where it is drawn on

• pure-vsm-part-iii-applications-and-politics — the whole of chapter 18 (“Institutions, metasystems and change”) rests on it: the form of the book, the eight Thesis statements, institutions as “esoteric boxes”, and the case for metasystemic monitoring.

Formulation notes

Recorded in the manuscript, with locators:

• First Thesis (PFC 1975: 15) — “Man is a prisoner of his own way of thinking and of his own stereotypes of himself. […] Complexity is the very stuff of today’s world. The tool for handling complexity is ORGANIZATION. But our concepts of organization belong to the much less complex old world”.
• Second Thesis (PFC 1975: 49) — “We need to invoke SCIENCE”; society instead proceeds “by consensus”, which “buys protection against megalomaniacs, fascists, charlatans and lunatics and which also protects us from novelty, unique ability, change and leadership”.
• Third Thesis (PFC 1975: 99) — three things to do: “FIRST do some thinking[,] reconstruct the language, and then operate metasystemically” — and “make provision this time for continuous metasystemic monitoring”.
• Fourth Thesis (PFC 1975: 131) — institutions are “self-contained cells”, “esoteric boxes difficult to penetrate”, whose stability is “in itself a good and therefore unadaptable — something highly dangerous”; reforming separate institutions will not reform society because “the major instabilities of society arise between the esoteric boxes”.

Related

• stafford-beer — the author; the chronology of his books.
• pure-vsm-appendix — the chronology and the textual notes table.
• viable-system-model — the model chapter 18’s argument is applied through.
• cybersyn — the Chilean work that precedes and feeds the Arguments.

Note: PFC is not among the works the manuscript cites for the model’s formulation — it is drawn on for Beer’s social cybernetics and the change argument, not for the VSM’s rules.