System One

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System One

The set of operational units of the System-in-focus, each itself a viable system (DTS 1985: 19). From Pure VSM — Overview Draft 0.8; not project canon.

What Beer says

  • Each unit has “its own relations with the outside world, its own management problems within the corporation and its own control system embedded in the large one” (BOTF 1981: 125, caption to Figure 20).
  • “And if any has a special primacy, it is System One — because it consists itself of viable systems.” “And what the viable system does is done by System One” (DTS 1985: 128).
  • “never forget that the division is short of a metalanguage. Thus corporate objectives cannot even be expressed in the language of System One” (BOTF 1981: 159).
  • Units generate variety “on the horizontal axis of the diagram”; vertical constraints limit this (DTS 1985: 81). How much the metasystem absorbs is the First Axiom (HOE 1979: 217).

Where it sits in the model

It does the work of the Viable System Model. System Two damps oscillation among units; System Three holds inside-and-now. The metasystem may delimit System One autonomy only to preserve coherence of the whole (BOTF 1981: 275). Each unit is a nested viable system (Recursion).

Textual notes

Three-part embedment is BOTF Figure 20; primacy/POSIWID is DTS. Horizontal variety sits with the six vertical loops under System Three. BOTF groups One–Three as internal/autonomic stability (BOTF 1981: 76).

Punch and Judy

Punch and Judy argues that Beer’s criterion for identifying a System One unit — the manuscript’s own paraphrase that the candidate must be viable in its own right and be one of the units that do what the containing system does — resolves in practice to a judgment call that cannot settle a tie between two competent analysts (Ch 5), and that the setting of System One autonomy, which Beer assigns to the resource bargain, is claimed determinate but never computed or measured (Ch 13). The authors mark the criterion as their own formulation, note that bounded autonomy was reached independently by other literatures (Ch 10), and present the whole as a stress test, not a verdict on Beer’s model.

Open points

Chapter 7 abstract flags none. First Axiom detail is pointed to chs 3.4 and 9.2.

Part II — The Viable System Model · Viable System Model · System Two · System Three · Recursion · Viability, identity and autonomy · Punch and Judy — Overview