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18.1 The form of the book

“No, it isn’t meant to be poetry” (PFC 1975: 2). Beer expects the reader of Platform for Change (1975) to be surprised by the layout, since he writes in grouped lines rather than continuous prose, and he explains the choice at the outset. He has already published books “in the approved style”, and gives the reason for departing from it: “It is the business of words to communicate but the more is not the merrier” (ibid.). Poets and mathematicians, he observes, use devices other than words to convey meaning, and grouping is one of them: it cuts down “verbiage” and “pinpoints ideas” (ibid.). He admits that the form may be tiring at first, and ties the difficulty to his theme: “reading habits thinking habits running-the-world habits they are all hard to break” (ibid.). The form belongs to the argument. A book about changing habits of thought, written in the habitual form, would contradict itself in a small way. The layout asks the reader to do what the content asks of society: to break a familiar pattern of processing. The book is physically structured as well. Its pages are color-coded. Narrative pages comment on the “Arguments of Change”, which are printed on white pages; each Argument is “an aspect of a wider case” (PFC 1975: 10). The Arguments are lectures and papers from 1969 to 1973, most of them from 1970 (see 18.6), so the book collects the period that includes the Chilean work described in chapter 16. The wider case is set out in eight “Thesis” statements, presented “in a colour of its own” (PFC 1975: 10). They are short, and together they are the most compact statement of Beer’s social cybernetics in that period. The sections below follow them and then take up three concepts that recur through the book: metasystem, eudemony, and the distinction between data and information.

18.2 The eight Thesis statements

The eight statements form a sequence. The first two diagnose the problem and name the means; the third says what to do; the fourth to seventh work through institutions, measurement, information and decision; the eighth names the ethical condition. First (PFC 1975: 15): “Man is a prisoner of his own way of thinking and of his own stereotypes of himself. […] The new world is characterized by the need to manage complexity. Complexity is the very stuff of today’s world. The tool for handling complexity is ORGANIZATION. But our concepts of organization belong to the much less complex old world”. The first thesis joins a claim about the world to a claim about its managers. Complexity has increased and must be managed; the managers’ concepts of organization lag behind. The gap between the two is the problem of the whole book. The Massey Lectures describe the same gap as relaxation time exceeding the interval between perturbations (see chapter 17.1). Second (PFC 1975: 49): “We need to invoke SCIENCE”, with its means: mathematics, general systems theory, “to devise viable organizations through cybernetics”, behavioural science, operational research. Instead society proceeds “by consensus”, which “buys protection against megalomaniacs, fascists, charlatans and lunatics and which also protects us from novelty, unique ability, change and leadership”. Beer does not dismiss consensus. He names what it protects against, and then what it costs. The mechanism that filters out the dangerous also filters out the new. In the vocabulary of variety, consensus is an attenuator that cannot tell one kind of variety from another. Third (PFC 1975: 99): “There are three things to do: FIRST do some thinking[,] reconstruct the language, and then operate metasystemically” — and “make provision this time for continuous metasystemic monitoring”. The three steps move from thought to language to structure. The words “this time” imply that earlier attempts at reform lacked the last element: a metasystem that goes on watching after the change has been made. Fourth (PFC 1975: 131): “Institutions are self-contained cells […]. They are esoteric boxes difficult to penetrate”. The omitted part of the first sentence names what holds each cell together: “the nucleus— the organizing principle called the cytoblast— is management itself” (PFC 1975: 131). Institutions have characteristics “that make them highly stable —in itself a good and therefore unadaptable —something highly dangerous”. Reforming separate institutions will not reform society, because “there is not likely to be enough time left” and because “the major instabilities of society arise between the esoteric boxes” (ibid.). The esoteric boxes are the image the rest of the book keeps returning to, and the Fourth Thesis is where the concept of the metasystem starts. If the instabilities lie between the boxes, no single box’s management can deal with them, however competent. Something has to operate at the level of the relations between them, and that is what Beer means by a metasystem in this book (18.3). The remark that stability is “in itself a good and therefore unadaptable” restates a point that runs through Beer’s work: the mechanisms that make a system stable are the ones that resist change. Fifth (PFC 1975: 159): To design metasystems for “systems of esoteric boxes we must have a metric”. Money “ought to be viewed essentially as the metric of constraint”; “Call the new and hypothetical metric: eudemony.” A metasystem needs to measure what it regulates. Money measures one aspect of the relations between the boxes, and Beer reads it as a measure of constraint. Well-being needs a metric of its own, which is named here and, as “hypothetical” says, still undefined (18.4). Sixth (PFC 1975: 243): Such a metric depends on the measurement of information flow; “the way in which society handles the commodity of information which is what changes us and the commodity of data which are the raw materials of information will prove to be critical […] even to the preservation of human freedom”. The sixth thesis ties measurement to freedom. For Beer, how a society treats information bears on liberty. The link to Designing Freedom, where liberty depends on the variety constraints a system imposes, is direct (see chapter 17). Seventh (PFC 1975: 299): New institutions need “dynamics of decision, fast-responding, self-regulating, self-organizing”. This “does away with sterile models of institutions as being for instance centralized or decentralized since any viable system is both at once. Such tired old issues are easily resolved metalinguistically.” “The institution most needing reform under these cybernetic canons is government itself”. The claim that “any viable system is both at once” centralized and decentralized compresses what the viable system model does with that old opposition. The operational units are autonomous, the metasystem provides cohesion, and both are present at every level of recursion. Beer’s design for Chile, in which each level received “only its own Cyberstride reports”, is an instance (see chapter 16.4). The thesis ends by naming government as the principal target, which is also the subject of the third Massey Lecture. Eighth (PFC 1975: 370): “Change cannot occur within the framework of the existing ethic: mankind needs to formulate a new ethic”. Its basis is “a true and not spurious compassion” and the recognition that technology makes mankind “unimaginably wealthy”, but that the wealth “is largely consumed by massive waste”. The sequence ends outside cybernetics proper. Beer does not claim that the model supplies the ethic. He claims that without a change in ethic the structural changes of the earlier theses will not occur.

18.3 Metasystem

“Metasystem” appears throughout Beer’s writing, and Platform for Change gives it its most economical definition, derived from the idea of a metalanguage: “If a system speaks a language appropriate to that system the deficiencies of which (its undecidable propositions) can be discussed only in a metalanguage— then the system that speaks the metalanguage is a metasystem. There is no more to it than that” (PFC 1975: 71). The definition is logical rather than hierarchical. A metasystem is defined by what it can talk about: the questions that cannot be settled inside the system’s own language. Beer at once takes up a misunderstanding that the prefix invites. People seem to think, he writes, that a metasystem “being ‘over and beyond’ the system to which it relates has some special kind of authority— that it secretly manipulates the system and is sinister” (ibid.). His answer: “The power of a metasystem lies only in its logical capacity to explain” (ibid.). This fits the treatment of autonomy elsewhere. In The Heart of Enterprise Beer argues that the metasystem should intervene only as far as cohesion requires (see chapter 17.2). Platform for Change makes the prior point: the metasystem’s standing comes from its logical position, and command has nothing to do with it. Why are metasystems needed? Because integration cannot be achieved from inside the parts. Integration requires models drawn at the level of integration: the answer, Beer writes, is “by drawing our models at the level of integration. They will be metasystemic models” (PFC 1975: 66). Beer’s diagnosis of his time is that such models are lacking: “the macro-systems of our firms and social institutions do not hang together, while the interaction of micro-systems is self-defeating” (PFC 1975: 60). The two halves of that sentence match the Fourth Thesis. The boxes do not cohere as a whole, and the instabilities arise in the interactions between them.

18.4 Eudemony

The Fifth Thesis names its new metric “eudemony”. Beer takes the term from Sir Charles Goodeve and explains how Goodeve arrived at it. Goodeve had noted that a population drift would be hard to measure in terms of the many reasons for which individuals decide to move home. “He proposed instead that we measure the rate of drift itself, and also its rate of change”, and interpret the results in terms of potential difference (PFC 1975: 167). What, then, does the potential measure? Goodeve’s answer, as Beer reports it, was “some complicated image of well-being”, for which he chose “the entirely suitable Greek word ‘eudemony’” (ibid.). Beer glosses the word: “This is one of the Greek words for happiness, though it comes nearer to meaning prosperity than ecstasy” (ibid.). He knows he is reviving an unfamiliar term: “I ask you to bear with me in my attempt to regain currency for this moribund term” (ibid.). The method matters as much as the word. Goodeve’s approach, as Beer presents it, leaves the micro-level decisions unmodeled and measures the macro-level flow in which preferences show themselves. Beer states the general point just before the example: we “seek useful answers instead at the macro-level where the social preferences actually emerge” (PFC 1975: 167). On my reading, the discussion of metasystems made the same move: measure at the level of integration, between the boxes. Eudemony is thus, in my interpretation rather than in Beer’s words, a measure that belongs to a metasystem. The term returns in Brain of the Firm as the measure registered by the algedonic meter (BOTF 1981: 283; see chapter 16.6), and in the Eighth Thesis as “the eudemony of man”. Across these uses it designates the same thing: a measure of well-being taken from the flows of a system rather than constructed from its parts.

18.5 Data and information

The Sixth Thesis calls information “what changes us” and data “the raw materials of information” (PFC 1975: 243). One of the Arguments of Change states the distinction polemically: “The purpose is regulation. And that means translating data into information. Information is what changes us. […] Data, I want to say to you, are an excrescence. Data are the very latest kind of pollution” (PFC 1975: 223). Beer grants data a use while denying them value of their own: “data of themselves have no value. What has value is the machinery to transform data into information, and the machinery by which that information may be used to innervate society” (ibid.). The metaphor of innervation leads straight to the model: “Society has become a complex organism, and it needs a nervous system” (ibid.). The viable system model, originally derived from the nervous system, is proposed here as the structure of such a nervous system for society, one that would run between the esoteric boxes as well as inside them. Cybernet and Cyberstride in Chile were an attempt to build one part of it: a network that carried data, and a filter that turned them into signals worth acting on (see chapter 16.3). The phrase “information is what changes us” returns in The Heart of Enterprise as the reason why plans must continually abort (see chapter 19.2).

18.6 The Arguments of Change: dates and occasions

Each Argument of Change opens with a title page, and a note at its foot states where and when the piece was given or published. The list below takes its occasions and dates from those notes, in the order of the book (all title pages checked on the scan). Where a note gives no day, no place, or a date of publication rather than of delivery, the list says so in square brackets; the bracketed remarks are mine, not Beer’s.

Beer’s narrative pages give the chronology behind the list. “The ARGUMENTS OF CHANGE so far expressed here were all set out during 1970 the first year of the project PLATFORM FOR CHANGE” (PFC 1975: 393). The title pages show three exceptions to the letter of that sentence, and the narrative accounts for each. The Cytoblast address, the first of the four on institutions, “was presented during the run-up to the project” (PFC 1975: 128). The UNESCO invitation “came during the count-down to the project” (PFC 1975: 101). The BBC piece was “the last piece I wrote in the first year of the project”, “recorded and broadcast in January” (PFC 1975: 327). The Surrogate World address follows that remark and belongs to the second year, 1971 (PFC 1975: 393). The Fanfare is “this last address written at the end of the third year of the project” (PFC 1975: 417). Beer also notes that “Every Argument of Change in this book except this one” (Dynamics of Decision) was a carefully prepared presentation, and that during the first year he advanced extempore Arguments of Change in nine towns and cities, with “half a dozen in London” (PFC 1975: 274); by his account these are not in the book.

Two dates in the narrative do not fit the rest and are left as printed. Beer calls the Washington presentation “the first of the actual year 1970” (PFC 1975: 213), but its title page gives 27 January 1970, and the Operational Research Society address is dated 14 January 1970 (PFC 1975: 219, 55). And the narrative dates the encounter with Chile: “It happened in the middle of 1972” (PFC 1975: 417), whereas Brain of the Firm dates Flores’s first letter 13 July 1971 (see 16.2).

The Classic Library reprint used here adds a Reader’s Guide by Jon Li with a “Table of platforms” listing the same fifteen pieces (PFC 1975: 463–464, reprint pagination). It is not Beer’s text and is not used as a source for the list above.

References

• PFC — Beer, Stafford (1975). Platform for Change. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Cited from the Stafford Beer Classic Library reprint, 1994.
• BOTF — Beer, Stafford (1981). Brain of the Firm. 2nd ed. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. (1st ed. London: Allen Lane, 1972.)