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14.1 Purpose of DTS

Beer opens Diagnosing the System for Organizations with the organization chart. He calls it “geological genealogy”: a structure frozen out of history and “rationalized — after the event”, which has “little to offer [the manager] beyond a procedural method for blaming somebody for whatever has gone wrong” (DTS 1985: i). The same criticism appears in his other books (see chapter 4.1). Against it he sets the claim of cybernetics to be the science of organizing effectively, and he states the aim of the book: it should guide any manager through the questions of his own organizational structure “without requiring of him or her any prior knowledge at all of this difficult interdisciplinary subject” (DTS 1985: i). DTS (1985) is the third of Beer’s books on the viable system model, after Brain of the Firm and The Heart of Enterprise, and it is a different kind of book. It is a workbook, and Beer presents it as one: the reader is meant to work through it with a particular organization in mind, drawing and redrawing the model. Where the organization chart records a structure after the event, the charts of DTS are drawn in order to find out what is wrong. Beer compares the book with the handbook of a technical appliance. Such a handbook reduces the electronics to diagrams; “This book reduces cybernetics to diagrams” (DTS 1985: ii). Like a handbook it introduces a few technical terms, and “it gets by with less than twenty technical terms” (ibid.). A handbook shows how to use a system but not how to design it, and here DTS claims more: “This book will tell you how to design an organizational structure — and HOW TO DIAGNOSE a faulty one” (ibid.). On the same page Beer states the book’s limits. It deliberately leaves out psychology, social anthropology and industrial relations, although “a lot is implicit in this book that derives from these fields”, and also “the problems of measurement and filtration”, which are treated in BOTF and HOE (DTS 1985: ii). The aim is to consider organizational structure “in the shortest posisble [sic] compass” (ibid.). DTS is therefore the most compact statement of the structure of the model. The reasons behind many of its requirements (the variety calculus, the neurophysiological model, the measurement of instability) have to be sought in the two earlier books.

14.2 The sequence of the diagnosis

The book leads through the model in eight sections and a “Completion of the Model” (DTS 1985: contents). The order is itself a statement about how a diagnosis should proceed. The sections carry no titles: each opens with a hand-lettered “§ ONE”, “§ TWO” and so on, and the contents page lists them only as “Section One” to “Section Eight” (DTS 1985: contents, 1, 19, 37, 55, 73, 91, 107, 123). The section topics below are therefore summarized from the text and from the “special terms” Beer lists at the end of each section; the quotations show how Beer frames each step.

  1. Choose the System-in-focus and its recursions (Section One, from p. 1). The first task is to decide which system is being diagnosed and where it sits among the systems that contain it and that it contains: “NOW DO THIS: Choose and clearly define the System-in-focus that you intend to model. Survey the sets of recursions of viable systems that constitute its organizational ‘ecology’, both vertically and horizontally” (DTS 1985: 16). The operational units are to be those “that between them PRODUCE THE COMPANY” (DTS 1985: 8). Chapter 6 discusses the recursion principle that this step applies.
  2. Start with System One; variety and the First Principle (Section Two, from p. 19). “The best place to start work is the embedded viable system of the System-in-focus […] because it is this part of the viable system that produces it” (DTS 1985: 19). Beer adds a practical check on the choice of recursion: a list of embedded units might contain “up to seven or eight: not many more, I hope, or else you may be missing a whole level of recursion” (ibid.). Beginning with System One rather than with senior management reverses the usual order of an organizational review. It follows the argument of chapter 7: the operational units produce the system, and the metasystem exists to serve them. The same section introduces variety, the Law of Requisite Variety, attenuators and amplifiers, and states the First Principle of Organization (DTS 1985: 30, 35).
  3. The command axis, the resource bargain, and channels and transducers (Section Three, from p. 37). The section starts from the fact that the Senior Management “is IN PRINCIPLE unable to entertain the variety generated by any one (never mind all) of its subsidiary viable systems that constitute System One” (DTS 1985: 37). It then takes the threads of the command axis in turn: legal and corporate requirements, the Resource Bargain, accountability, and the Regulatory Centre (DTS 1985: 38–41). Its second half treats channel capacity and transducers and states the Second and Third Principles of Organization (DTS 1985: 47, 53). Chapter 12 discusses the channel and transduction principles introduced here.
  4. The Fourth Principle, System One as a whole, and oscillation (Section Four, from p. 55). The section adds time to the three spatial principles with the Fourth Principle (DTS 1985: 55), assembles the “complete structural account of System One” with its environments (DTS 1985: 56–63), and ends with oscillation between the elements of System One and the introduction of System Two as the anti-oscillatory device (DTS 1985: 64–71).
  5. System Two, the six vertical channels including audit, and System Three (Section Five, from p. 73). The section continues System Two, collects the vertical channels, adds audit as the sixth, states the First Axiom of Management (DTS 1985: 81–84), and names System Three and Three-Star (DTS 1985: 86).
  6. System Three, managerial style and the convergence of purpose (Section Six, from p. 91). The section asks for a list of the System Three components of the System-in-focus (DTS 1985: 92–94) and turns to managerial style (DTS 1985: 95). Here the reader checks the First Axiom from two sides: how it “appears to be met • as System Three sees it; • as System One sees it. Be honest. Talk informally with those concerned. There are ALWAYS surprises in this exercise” (DTS 1985: 95). It goes on to purpose (“The purpose of a system is what it does.”, DTS 1985: 99), to the convergence of purpose between recursions, and to autonomy (DTS 1985: 98–105).
  7. System Four, the Three–Four homeostat and the Second Axiom (Section Seven, from p. 107; the Second Axiom of Management is listed at DTS 1985: 121). The transition is marked by a reminder that the environment of the System-in-focus is larger than the sum of its parts’ environments: “The fact is that the sum of all the System One environments is less than the total environment of the System-in-focus” (DTS 1985: 107). Beer is blunt about what the reader will find here: “VERY FEW ENTERPRISES have a well-functioning System Four. EVEN FEWER conform to the Principles that govern homeostasis” (DTS 1985: 117).
  8. System Five, closure, the Law of Cohesion and the algedonic signal (Section Eight, from p. 123). The section approaches System Five obliquely, through variety attenuation in chess (DTS 1985: 123–124), and then states closure and the Third Axiom of Management (DTS 1985: 130) and the Law of Cohesion (DTS 1985: 132). The algedonic signal (chapter 12) comes at the end, with the task to “MAKE A LIST” of the organization’s algedonic signals and to consider whether informal ones should be formalized (DTS 1985: 133).
  9. Cross-recursion linkages (“Completion of the Model” in the contents; the page itself is headed “Completion of the Viable System Model”): “System Two and Three-Star require cross-recursion coordination of a delicate kind — if autonomy is to be preserved” (DTS 1985: 135). The final task asks for “a detailed analysis, with lists, of the linkages across the three recursions shown in Figure 37, for each subsystem of the viable system. If they do not severally exhibit Requisite Variety, what shall you (in each such case) propose?” (ibid.). This step applies the Law of Cohesion (chapter 13). The Law is stated two pages earlier, where Beer says that Figure 37 “puts the whole VSM together” and “leads straight to” the Law (DTS 1985: 132); the Completion page does not repeat its name. The sequence moves from the operations upward to the metasystem and then outward across recursions. A diagnosis in this order builds the model of the organization from what it produces, and only then asks whether the management structure has requisite variety for it. Throughout, the reader is given tasks (“NOW DO THIS:”). They range from placing oneself in the recursions (“You are a viable system. In which viable system are you embedded?”, DTS 1985: 6) to listing the regulatory actions between System One managements and their operations (DTS 1985: 41). The book is meant to be worked, and reading it without doing the tasks misses its purpose. The appendix holds diagnostic charts that may be copied. Beer expects that most readers will turn to it early “and will proceed to rob themselves of a learning experience” (DTS 1985: 137). He grants explicit permission to reproduce the charts (though not the text or the figures) and recommends making pads of each chart, “so that rough analyses can be made, torn up, and improved upon without fuss” (ibid.). He also recommends enlarging them: “on a VSM chart ‘blown up’ to several feet high, it is often possible to give a succinct account of an organization, and its diagnosis, that would take a report several hundred pages long to ‘explain’” (DTS 1985: 137). The remark makes a claim about the model as a language. A diagram in its notation carries a diagnosis in compressed form. This is the chart Beer sets against the “geological genealogy” of 14.1.

14.3 Speed of diagnosis

In a paper of 1984, reprinted in Think Before You Think, Beer returns to diagnosis. Confidence in the VSM, he reports, derives “not so much from the fact that the pathology of the viable system can be investigated with ease, as from the speed with which the diagnosis can be made. The knowledgeable user may expect to ‘home in’ on (say) half-a-dozen causes of concern within a day or so of exposure to the real-life system” (TBYT 2009, “The Viable System Model”: 148). He continues that it is “a frequent experience to find such danger points when they have been deliberately concealed out of embarrassment or self-serving: they tend to signal themselves” (ibid.). Such incidents, he adds, “tend to enhance the confidence not only of the VSM-er, but of the client management itself” (ibid.). The claim is empirical, and Beer offers it as a report from practice, introduced with “Subjectively speaking” (TBYT 2009: 148). He does not spell out in this passage why diagnosis can be so fast. What follows is an interpretation, not Beer’s statement: a likely reason lies in the structure of the model: because every viable system must have the same five subsystems and the same kinds of connection, the diagnostician knows in advance what to look for and can recognize quickly where something is missing or malfunctioning. The same paper uses the vocabulary of medicine for this: “the etiology of the disorder may be traced, a prognosis may be prepared, and antidotes (even surgery) may be prescribed” (TBYT 2009: 148). Chapter 15 takes up the pathologies that such a diagnosis typically finds.

References

  • 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.