Diagnosing the System for Organizations

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Diagnosing the System for Organizations

1985 (John Wiley, Chichester). Abbreviation: DTS.

In Pure VSM — Overview, DTS is a workbook: it “will tell you how to design an organizational structure — and HOW TO DIAGNOSE a faulty one” (DTS 1985: ii). It leaves psychology, measurement and filtration to Brain of the Firm and The Heart of Enterprise (ibid.). Start at System One of the System-in-focus. Not project canon.

Where it is drawn on

Heaviest in Part II — The Viable System Model ch. 14. Also Part I — Foundations ch. 2; Systems One–Five (chs 7, 9–11); Recursion; Algedonic signal; Viability, identity and autonomy.

Formulation notes

From Pure VSM — Appendix: System Two as “anti-oscillatory device for System One” (DTS 1985: 66); six vertical channels — Corporate Intervention, Resource Bargain, operational linkages, environmental intersects, System Two, audit (DTS 1985: 81–82 vs HOE 1979: 142–143); viability, OED “able to maintain a separate existence” (DTS 1985: 1); variety as “the number of possible states of the system” (DTS 1985: 98); Axioms use “equals” (DTS 1985: 130).

Punch and Judy

Punch and Judy (v0.5.0 draft — not canon) engages DTS as the source of two of its charges: its Chapter 20 finds Beer’s ‘more or less useful’ sentence set apart on DTS’s second page and argues the tradition kept it while dropping the prediction test Beer attached, and its Chapter 26 sets DTS beside Designing Freedom to argue that descent from this workbook rather than Beer’s political books put the person outside the analysis, its raw term counts marked indicative. The coda draws on DTS for the point that naming the system is the method’s first step and the one the method names but gives no procedure for. The critique is the authors’, in a stress test, not Beer’s position and not an established result.

Stafford Beer · Viable System Model · Brain of the Firm · The Heart of Enterprise · Pure VSM — Overview · Punch and Judy — Overview