---
title: "content"
description: "Diagnosing the System for Organizations (1985) opens with a dictionary entry: “VIABLE: able to maintain a separate existence — The Oxford English Dictionary”…"
url: "https://wiki.cybernetic-futures.org/pure-vsm/part-02-the-viable-system-model/ch05-viability-identity-and-autonomy/ch05-viability-identity-and-autonomy-content"
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site: "Cybernetic Futures"
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# content

## 5.1 Viability
*Diagnosing the System for Organizations* (1985) opens with a dictionary entry: "**VIABLE:** able to maintain a separate existence — *The Oxford English Dictionary*". The word that gives the model its name is used so often that it is easy to overlook how Beer himself defines it. He does so in three places, with slightly different emphases, and they are best read together.
In DTS an organization is viable "if it can survive in a particular sort of environment" (DTS 1985: 1). The phrase "a particular sort of environment" matters. Viability is no property that an organization has in itself, apart from its surroundings; it is the ability to survive in a given kind of environment.
Beer immediately guards against a misreading of "separate existence". He continues: "For although its existence is *separate*, so that it enjoys some kind of autonomy, it cannot survive in a vacuum" (ibid.). His example is the foetus, which is called viable when it can "maintain a separate existence", long before it is born, and which afterwards remains tied to mother, family, locality and culture. Separate existence does not mean isolation: "existence is never independent of other existences, even though the individual has a separate **identity**" (ibid.). He applies the same reasoning to organizations: "A village is a recognizable and viable organization, with its church and its school, its butcher's and its baker's: but it is embedded in a rural society that nourishes it" (ibid.). A firm may be the subsidiary of a larger corporation: "it is a viable entity in itself, but in a specially defined way it 'belongs' to (what is often called) the 'parent' company" (ibid.).
That subsidiary will come back in each section below. On this first page of DTS it already holds three ideas that the later chapters of this book treat separately: separate existence (viability), autonomy, and embedding in a larger system. The embedding is the starting point of recursion (see chapter 6); the subsidiary that "belongs" to a parent company is the case of System One (see chapter 7).
In an essay of 1982/83 Beer adds identity to the definition: "A viable system is one sustaining the capability for independent existence as a recognizable identity" (TBYT 2009, "The Will of the People": 107). He goes on: "Thus a person is a viable system, and so is a firm" (ibid.). The formulation is more compact than the one in DTS, and it makes explicit what DTS leaves implicit: what survives is a recognizable identity. An organization that continues to exist in name, but has become something unrecognizably different, has not in this sense remained viable. In the same essay Beer notes that institutions devised to express the will of the people "are supposedly viable systems. They do not work at all well, and so their future viability is in question" (ibid.). On this reading, an institution's continued existence does not guarantee its viability.
In *Brain of the Firm* Beer defines viability through the intention to survive: the firm "is something organic, which intends to survive — and that is why I call it a viable system" (BOTF 1981: 75). This is the earliest of the three formulations and the least technical. It links viability to purpose: the firm is viable not merely because it survives but because it intends to. Chapter 4 showed how this definition motivates the choice of a known viable system, the human body, as the model.
The three passages give a consistent picture. Viability is the capacity to maintain a separate existence (DTS), as a recognizable identity (TBYT), in a particular kind of environment (DTS), by a system that intends to survive (BOTF). The connection of these elements is my summary; each element is Beer's.
## 5.2 Identity
*The Heart of Enterprise* (1979) gives the clearest statement of why identity is the reference point of viability. People, Beer observes, accept "'the system' as if it were given in nature, or handed to them on an institutional plate". He replies: "What truly is given in nature is a collection of principles that systems cannot violate if they are to maintain their identity" (HOE 1979: 24). These principles, he continues, "are the content of the science of cybernetics, which may conveniently be defined as the science of effective organization" (ibid.).
The sentence does two things. It defines cybernetics by reference to identity: its principles are those a system must respect if it is to remain itself. And it sets these principles against arrangements that people take as given but which are in fact conventions, such as the boundaries of a system and their legal definition, which Beer discusses on the same page. The conventions can be changed. The principles cannot be violated without loss of identity.
In DTS Beer relates identity to the structure of the viable system. Commenting on his first sketch of the model, he notes that viable systems "are **self-referential**. Their logic closes-in on itself", and that in this characteristic lies the explanation for "the maintenance of identity", "self-awareness", "the facility of self-repair" and "recursivity itself" (DTS 1985: 4). Identity, on this account, follows from the way the system refers to itself, rather than being a label attached from outside.
Identity returns later in HOE, where Beer discusses cohesion between levels of recursion. Understanding cohesion is important, he writes, "because it governs the question of **identity** in the viable system" (HOE 1979: 351). His illustration comes from his own work as director of System Four in an international corporation, when he discovered that the chairman of a large division was secretly moving to sell it: "Autonomy is one thing, but..." (ibid.). Here the subsidiary of DTS page 1 turns up in practice, a viable entity in itself that still "belongs" to its parent. The unfinished sentence names the tension that 5.3 examines. How identity is carried by System Five is the subject of chapter 11.
## 5.3 Autonomy
Beer derives autonomy from the Greek: "The word 'autonomy' is pure Greek; it might be freely translated as meaning 'a law unto itself'. So when we speak of autonomy, either in the body or in the firm, we mean that the branch or function indicated is responsible for its own regulation" (BOTF 1981: 103). The definition is functional. Autonomy means responsibility for one's own regulation; it does not mean independence from the whole.
Autonomy is also a necessity: "If every aspect of the business, every smallest decision, had to be thought about consciously at the senior management level, then the firm would grind to a halt rather quickly" (ibid.). Beer adds: "It is the same in the body and the same reasons apply" (ibid.). The argument is one of capacity. No central management can attend to everything, so large parts of any complex organization must regulate themselves. For the variety-theoretic background see chapter 3.
In the summary of Part Two Beer states the dilemma: "If a division of the firm were really and truly autonomous it would not be part of the firm at all. \[...\] On the other hand if the heart and liver were not more or less autonomous, we would have to remember to tell them what to do all the time — and we would be dead in ten minutes" (BOTF 1981: 75–76). He applies the second horn to the firm as well: "if a division of the firm is not more or less autonomous, the main board has to run it directly — which is equally impossible. Besides, the divisional staff would resign" (BOTF 1981: 76). Both extremes are ruled out. Complete autonomy dissolves the whole, and no autonomy overloads it.
Beer names the body's solution "the autonomous nervous system" (BOTF 1981: 76). Beer's text continues: "The body has understood this dilemma for several hundred thousand years, and we can learn from it" (ibid.). Here the neurophysiological model of chapter 4 becomes an argument about organization. The body shows that the dilemma can be resolved, and the structure by which it resolves it, Systems One, Two and Three, is what the model takes over.
The rule for the metasystem is that it has "the authority to delimit the autonomy of any \[...\] System One", but it "should do so according to the cybernetic rules, \[...\] which are intended to preserve the maximum autonomy for \[...\] System One consistent with preserving the coherence of \[the whole\] as a viable system itself" (BOTF 1981: 275). The passage comes from Beer's discussion of a firm that is itself a System One of a larger system, the subsidiary once more, and he adds that the firm's autonomy "preserves it from nosey-parkerdom" in the System Three above it (ibid.). The rule has two parts: autonomy is maximal, and its limit is the coherence of the whole. Neither part alone is the rule.
In HOE this becomes the question of freedom: "*Freedom is in principle a computable function of systemic purpose as perceived*" (HOE 1979: 158; see chapter 17). Among the steps leading to this conclusion is a statement about cohesion and purpose: "Viable systems of concentrated purpose will be closely-knit, highly cohesive. Viable systems of general purpose will be more loosely coherent" (ibid.). Beer knows how the conclusion sounds. He calls it "explosive precisely because it sounds heartless, whereas the dear question of freedom is full of heart" (ibid.). Later in HOE he summarizes: "a strong case was developed to say that metasystemic intervention in System One activity should be minimized" (HOE 1979: 200).
BOTF and HOE thus state one principle in two languages. In BOTF it is a rule of management: preserve maximum autonomy consistent with coherence. In HOE it is a claim about measurement: how much freedom an operational unit can have is, in principle, calculable from the purpose of the system as perceived. Chapter 7 describes the operational units to which this freedom applies.

## References

- **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.