1.1 From Wiener’s definition to “the science of effective organization”
In the notes to his first Massey Lecture, Beer records that cybernetics was “originally defined by the late Norbert Wiener as the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine” (DF 1974, Notes to Lecture 1). Beer did not invent the word or its first definition; he took both from Wiener. What he did with Wiener’s pair, the animal and the machine, is where any account of the Viable System Model has to start, because his books present the model throughout as an application of cybernetics rather than a free-standing management technique. In Decision and Control Beer keeps Wiener’s wording and widens its scope: cybernetics is “the science of control and communication wherever these occur in whatever kinds of system”. A claim follows at once to justify the widening. The core of the discipline is “the discovery that there is a unity of natural law in the way control must operate, whether the system controlled is animate or inanimate, physical or biological, social or economic” (DC 1966: 239). Everything else in Beer’s work depends on this sentence. If control does obey laws that hold across animals, machines, economies and firms, then control can legitimately be studied in one kind of system and the result applied to another. If it does not, the VSM would be no more than a metaphor. The connection to management comes next. In the connective summary that opens Part III of Decision and Control Beer writes: “Now if cybernetics is the science of control, management is the profession of control in a certain type of system” (DC 1966: 239). Fifteen pages later the thought returns in shorter form: “For cybernetics is the science of control; and management is the profession of control” (DC 1966: 254). Beer draws a methodological consequence from the pairing. Models taken from other sciences reach management only “at one remove”, by way of analogy, whereas “models drawn by the OR scientist from cybernetics have a direct bearing, an immediacy, which models drawn from other sciences lack” (DC 1966: 254). His reason is that the processes cybernetics studies “are to be found among brains, colonies of animals, and economic, social and managerial systems too” (ibid.). In 1967 Management Science repeats the argument and names the resulting field: “if cybernetics is the science of control, and if management might be described as the profession of control, there ought to be a topic called management cybernetics—and indeed there is” (MS 1967: 144; see chapter 27.6). The later books shorten the long definition to a formula. The Heart of Enterprise describes itself as concerned with “management cybernetics: the science of effective organization” (HOE 1979: 4). Twenty pages on, Beer says what such a science contains: “What truly is given in nature is a collection of principles that systems cannot violate if they are to maintain their identity. These principles are the content of the science of cybernetics, which may conveniently be defined as the science of effective organization” (HOE 1979: 24). The formula also appears in the Chile chapters and the prospectus of Brain of the Firm (BOTF 1981: 259, 351, 394). In its context, the HOE passage is aimed at the habit of accepting “the system” as if it were given in nature. Beer concludes: “We cannot successfully handle any system that we are disposed to manage unless we obtain an insight into its nature” (HOE 1979: 24). Read this way, the science of effective organization is the knowledge of what a system must satisfy in order to go on existing. In an essay collected in Think Before You Think, Beer uses the same definition and at once qualifies the word “effective”: “I define cybernetics as the science of effective organization. The adjective ‘effective’ at once entails a definition of purpose. But organizations do not have purposes. It is the perception and the purpose of the people who sponsor, operate, use and serve the organization that determine how it shall be deemed effective” (TBYT 2009: 24). He also says in what sense he speaks of laws: there are “fundamental facts about the way that large, complicated, probabilistic systems actually work, regulate themselves, organize themselves, learn, adapt and evolve, which seem to be invariant to the fabric of the system concerned” (ibid.). Three points follow from these passages for this book:
- For Beer, cybernetics is a science of invariant principles that a system cannot violate if it is to keep its identity, and the VSM is presented as a consequence of such principles rather than as one technique among others.
- “Effective organization” is not an efficiency criterion. The criterion in HOE is keeping identity and viability; nothing in the definition refers to cost per unit of output.
- Effectiveness is judged relative to purposes that people perceive. Beer’s statement that “organizations do not have purposes” (TBYT 2009: 24) anticipates the treatment of purpose as something imputed by an observer (see chapter 3.6).
1.2 A system is an act of recognition
“A system is not something given in nature, but something defined by intelligence” (DC 1966: 242). A science of systems might be expected to begin with an inventory of the systems that exist; Decision and Control begins with this sentence instead, and the argument that leads to it is short. Beer first describes talk about systems as speaking “of the coherence of a number of” entities (DC 1966: 241). He then asks what identifies a given collection of entities as coherent, and answers: “Surely this is an act of mental recognition” (DC 1966: 242). His example is a machine in Wiener’s sense, an internal combustion engine. It is “clearly” a system to us because we know it was designed to be one; someone without engineering knowledge might at first see only a random collection of objects (DC 1966: 242). To recognize a system is to recognize relations between its parts, and here Beer finds a difficulty: “In declaring that a collection ought to be called a system, that is to say, we acknowledge relatedness. But everything is related to everything else” (ibid.). If everything is related to everything else, the boundary of a system cannot be read off the world. Someone has to draw it, for some purpose. For the VSM the consequence is practical. Every VSM analysis begins with the observer’s decision about which system is “in focus”. Diagnosing the System for Organizations makes this the first step of the diagnosis: it is “important first of all to determine precisely what is the organization to be modelled, and to specify its boundaries” (DTS 1985: 2), and the last exercise of the first section begins “Choose and clearly define the System-in-focus that you intend to model” (DTS 1985: 16); chapter 6 relates that choice to the levels of recursion. The same observer-dependence returns in the measurement of variety, where the states that count depend on the purpose of the system (see chapter 2.1).
1.3 Exceedingly complex, probabilistic systems
The engine of section 1.2 is a system someone designed. Beer’s cybernetics is aimed at a different class: systems that cannot be fully described by analytical methods. In Decision and Control he writes that the kind of science “which is preoccupied with analytic method is not altogether adequate to the task of dealing with large and exceedingly complex systems and situations” (DC 1966: 219), and he draws a warning from this for his own profession: “Operational research is an empirical science; it is concerned with actual situations and not with idealizations of them” (ibid.). His principal example is the economy, which is “par excellence an exceedingly complex ramified system, too unspecified, too deeply interactive, and for that matter too undecidable” to be mapped onto a linear-programming matrix (DC 1966: 225). The number of variables is only part of the difficulty. In systems with “literally billions of variables” there is “no rigorous means of knowing which ‘matter’”; the importance of a particular variable “is a question of degree, a question of judgment, a question of convention”, and it changes from moment to moment (DC 1966: 98). Beer insists that this goes beyond the ordinary fact that the values of variables change: “the structural relevance of the variable inside the system is changing with time” (ibid.). The rest of the book responds to this problem. A system that cannot be specified completely cannot be controlled by a complete specification. Chapter 2 shows how Beer answers with the concept of variety, with the black box and with heuristic rather than algorithmic control.
1.4 Operational research and cybernetics
Beer came to cybernetics through operational research (OR), and Decision and Control is organized around the relation between the two. He defines OR as “the attack of modern science on complex problems arising in the direction and management” of enterprises (DC 1966: 89). The distinction he then draws is sharp. OR “means doing science in the management sphere: the subject is not itself a science, it is a scientific profession”, whereas in cybernetics “we encounter a science in its own right” (DC 1966: 239). In the same passage management cybernetics is described as “a rich provider of models for doing OR” (ibid.). The division of labor follows from this. OR is the practice of applying scientific method to managerial problems. Cybernetics is one of the sciences from which that practice can draw its models, and the one whose subject matter, control, coincides with the subject matter of management. That is why Beer’s later books, although written for managers, keep returning to laws, theorems and axioms (see chapter 3): he is presenting what he regards as the findings of a science to the profession that has to apply them.
1.5 Transdisciplinary, not interdisciplinary
In the essay “Laws of Anarchy”, collected in Think Before You Think, Beer first describes the partial pictures that different people have of cybernetics, among them its work on biological systems and especially on the brain. He then states: “The fact is that cybernetics is all of these things. I mean that it is all of these things put together and at the same time. It is not so much an interdisciplinary science as a transdisciplinary science” (TBYT 2009: 24). A science that claims to find the same laws in brains, machines and economies could easily be taken for a meeting place where several disciplines exchange ideas. Beer rejects that description. The difference matters for the argument of this book. An interdisciplinary science borrows results from one field and transfers them to another, and every such transfer raises the question of whether the analogy holds. A transdisciplinary science claims that its results belong to none of the fields in particular, because they describe regularities that hold in all of them. In the same essay Beer warns that taking cybernetics to pieces, and pointing to the cybernetic work done by engineers, neurophysiologists or social scientists, means “misleading ourselves” (TBYT 2009: 24). From this position he answers the charge of analogy.
1.6 Not an analogy
The jacket text of the second edition of Brain of the Firm, which names no author and refers to Beer in the third person, says that the comparison of brain and management structures “should not be thought of as ‘analogy’, but as the pursuit of fundamental principles whereby self-regulatory systems are necessarily constructed” (BOTF 1981, jacket text). The sentence answers a recurring misreading, that the VSM transfers the nervous system to the firm “by analogy”. Inside the book, in a passage that looks ahead to Part Two, Beer writes: “Models are more than analogies: they are meant to disclose the key structure of the system under study” (BOTF 1981: 75). The same passage explains why he chose the human nervous system. The firm is “something organic, which intends to survive”, and that is why Beer calls it a viable system (ibid.). To understand viability, one should use “a known-to-be-viable system as a model”. Another viable system, such as the amoeba, could have been used, and “The results are the same, as they must be if viability as such has its own laws and enshrines its own principles (as cyberneticians contend)” (BOTF 1981: 75). The body was chosen because it is rich, flexible and familiar to every reader, not because the firm resembles a body. Beer concedes that the firm has something like a head, a trunk and limbs, and that the comparison “could be extended in a literary way at great length”; but “we are not interested in comparisons but in models, and we ought to be scientific rather than literary” (BOTF 1981: 86). A page later: “There can be no interest in analogy at this point” (BOTF 1981: 87). Management Science draws the same line in more general terms: an analogy that is not made rigorous is “a literary trick—not very scientific” (MS 1967: 68). Wiener’s definition put the animal and the machine side by side. Beer’s claim goes further and says nothing about resemblance: there are invariant principles of control, these principles are the subject of cybernetics, and any system that stays viable must satisfy them, whether it is an animal, a machine or a firm. The brain is used because it is a well-studied instance of such a system. Whether the claim is justified is a separate question, taken up in chapters 4.1, 24.3 and 27.3. What sections 1.1 to 1.6 establish is that it is the claim Beer actually makes.
References
- DC — Beer, Stafford (1966). Decision and Control: The Meaning of Operational Research and Management Cybernetics. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Cited from the Stafford Beer Classic Library reprint, 1994.
- MS — Beer, Stafford (1967). Management Science: The Business Use of Operations Research. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, in association with Aldus Books, London.
- DF — Beer, Stafford (1974). Designing Freedom. London: John Wiley. Cited by lecture from a transcript edition.
- HOE — Beer, Stafford (1979). The Heart of Enterprise. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
- BOTF — Beer, Stafford (1981). Brain of the Firm. 2nd ed. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. (1st ed. London: Allen Lane, 1972.)
- DTS — Beer, Stafford (1985). Diagnosing the System for Organizations. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
- TBYT — Beer, Stafford (2009). Think Before You Think: Social Complexity and Knowledge of Knowing. Edited by David Whittaker. Charlbury: Wavestone Press.
- Wiener, Norbert. 1948. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: Wiley.