23.1 Syntegrity as a tool for System Four and the Three–Four homeostat
Besides the common origin traced in chapter 20, Beyond Dispute relates Team Syntegrity to the VSM explicitly in two places. BD ch. 9 is practical and concerns developmental planning in the enterprise. BD ch. 14 is theoretical and concerns recursion (see 23.2). Chapter 9 opens with a brief account of the five subsystems for readers who do not know the model, and it is through developmental planning that Beer places syntegration in the VSM. One sentence in that account is central for what follows: System Five “determines purposes for the enterprise, and in so doing cultivates its ethos” (BD 1994: 149). Beer adds that System Five is more than a label for top management: “recognizable bosses do not exhaust the role. All stakeholders are represented in System Five” (ibid.). From there Beer moves to what he treats as the typical weakness of enterprises, the relationship between System Three and System Four, and he presents it as a common diagnosis. The people of System Three, responsible for running current operations, see those of System Four (planners, market researchers, R&D) as “organizational luxuries who frivol away the money that they, in System Three, are labouring to make”, while System Four sees itself as custodian of the company’s future (BD 1994: 149). Both functions are indispensable, and yet, Beer writes, “there is a total lack of synergy between the two vital forces” (BD 1994: 150). The VSM diagram marks this relationship with heavy arrows: “The heavy arrows are saying: Systems Four and Three must massively interact; the main job of System Five (any included bosses notwithstanding) is to see that this interaction happens—all the time” (BD 1994: 150). He names this the “Three–Four homeostat: its function is to maintain a balance between investment for the future and the maintenance required to keep the business going” (ibid.). Chapter 11 of this book described the same homeostat; here Beer restates it in BD’s own terms. The consequence for planning follows. Developmental planning “cannot be isolated in System Four, although the VSM proposes that System Four be the concept of its focus” (BD 1994: 151). Planning is a process that “permeates the enterprise” (ibid.), and no single department produces it. This matches the view of planning as a continuous process set out in chapter 19. Only after this groundwork does Beer bring in syntegration, and he warns against treating it as one more planning technique. It is “all too easy to say that this is a technique that is clearly relevant to planning. After which it is even easier to say that we cannot commit 30 people for 5 days to this nice idea” (BD 1994: 157). The concept of the infoset joins the two lines of thought. In the section “The Redundancy of Potential Command” Beer argues from the brain, drawing on McCulloch, that command “is not prefigured, but is potential in any concatenation that shares the needful information. Well, this defines none other than an information set, an infoset” (BD 1994: 158). In enterprises, too, “Potential command will be seized and made actual by fluid infosets of people who have the shared purpose and the shared information appropriate to the decisions involved” (ibid.). His proposal puts the parts together: “if, as has been argued, the primary problem is the proper functioning of the Three–Four homeostat, then that would be a good place to start. We need to metabolize the creative and the synergetic resources of the enterprise. The directive management team of an enterprise is perhaps the most virile example of an infoset with which society is familiar” (BD 1994: 159). His example is a group of thirty such people meeting for five days under the Team Syntegrity protocol (BD 1994: 159–160). He also considers a variant in which any self-organizing group of thirty staff could apply for a week to hold a syntegration and report twelve findings to management. Such a scheme “should not be attempted unless the management makes an undertaking to respond in some way that is not merely cosmetic” (BD 1994: 161). The comparison he draws is with the suggestion box: “Voluntary syntegration raises the possible benefit by orders of magnitude” (ibid.). Read this way, syntegration is a procedure for making the Three–Four homeostat work, and it replaces no VSM subsystem. It gives the heavy arrows something to carry: it brings the people responsible for the inside-and-now and the outside-and-then (see chapters 9 and 10) into sustained interaction that is not ranked. The icosahedron’s “no top, no bottom” (chapter 21) matches the requirement that the homeostat be a balance and not a chain of command. An earlier application shows a second, smaller link. In the Hureston group, which had already used the VSM in a reorganization, Beer and the participants spent two days “discussing the relevance of the syntegrity model in the context of the VSM” (BD 1994: 76). They came away uncertain about the model’s status: “we did not know whether syntegrity should be used structurally, as it had been misapprehended, or procedurally, as it had been intended” (ibid.). Beer’s intention was a procedure; an organization chart was the misreading. One structural variant was nevertheless discussed. Each participant would belong to one wealth-producing project team and one quality-assurance team, which, Beer says, anyone familiar with the VSM “may think of […] as creating a characteristic repetitive loop: Three–One–Three Star–Three” (BD 1994: 77). Beer adds: “The meeting found the suggestion interesting, but it has not been tried” (ibid.). The loop is thus a suggestion from one meeting, not an established use of syntegrity within the VSM.
23.2 Recursion and consciousness
BD’s last chapter, ch. 14, “The Concept of Recursive Consciousness”, stands in Part Four (“Epilogue”), and it links the syntegrity model back to the VSM through recursion: “As embodied in the Viable System Model, the principle of recursion asserts that all viable systems contain, and are contained in, viable systems. This is by no means loosely expressed: it is rigorously determined by the Law of Cohesion in VSM theory” (BD 1994: 229). The formulation repeats the one discussed in chapters 6 and 13 of this book, joined here to Beer’s image of Russian dolls. Embedment does not mean hierarchy in the sense of command: “they do not necessarily imply hierarchical dependence in the command–obedience sense, nor compromise the integrity of the included identity” (ibid.). Beer draws the key distinction with care. On one side stands “sacerdotal” hierarchy: “Hierarchy means government by priests: it is a central fact of sacerdotal organization that every level of authority commands all of the levels lower down” (BD 1994: 241). His examples are pope and parishioner, general and enlisted soldier. On the other side stands embedment with autonomy: “hierarchies do not have to be based on the sacerdotal model, but may involve autonomous embedments” (BD 1994: 242). He places the VSM firmly on the second side: “According to the Viable System Model, which is also organized as a set of embedments, social systems should not be conceived of hierarchically either” (BD 1994: 241). The passage completes the “non-hieratic” demand of chapter 20 and supplies the conceptual ground for Beer’s earlier statement that the VSM is circular rather than hierarchical (BD 1994: 7, 148). The heavy arrows of the Three–Four homeostat run between embedded systems, with no priest at either end. The hyperinfoset of chapter 22 is built on the same principle: a “second level of recursive embedment” (BD 1994: 173) that adds breadth, not authority. On this basis Beer develops a theory of “recursive consciousness” with eight “embedments”, from the neuron to “consciousness at the level of global governance” (BD 1994: 244–250). The first embedment is the neuron, “as modelled here by the algedonode” (BD 1994: 244). The fifth is the group mind of the neighbourhood infoset, which Beer puts forward “simply because the neighbourhood infoset displays the usual tokens of consciousness” (BD 1994: 248). The sixth is the hyperset and the seventh the “technospheric infoset” (BD 1994: 249). Of the eighth he writes that “the brain-like capacities which would make the eighth embedment comparable to the fourth embedment in the individual are therefore missing. We are stuck with the woeful inadequacy of the United Nations” (BD 1994: 250). The starting definition is: “awareness is best described as self-awareness; that consciousness is a reflection of its own activity” (BD 1994: 213). Beer proposes the hypothesis of an “infosettic consciousness” of a syntegrating group and notes that it is “at least in principle, falsifiable” (BD 1994: 208). The same passage states the limits of the claim: “If it exists it should make the infoset more competent than its component member consciousness, or even the group consciousness defined. Experiments have yet to be designed, and will be difficult to conduct; all there is so far is empirically based suspicion which suggests the formulation of an hypothesis for which there is so far no scientific support” (BD 1994: 208). Beer also marks the change of register himself when he moves from Part Three to the Epilogue: “The ideas advanced in Part Three tentatively, out of scientific rectitude, are embraced freely in this essay” (BD 1994: 248). Note: In this chapter Beer also draws on his own yogic experience (“as I attest from yogic experience myself”, BD 1994: 247). The chapter is reported here, not evaluated. BD thus connects syntegrity and the VSM at two levels. At the practical level, syntegration is a procedure for the Three–Four homeostat and for developmental planning, and Beer argues for it with managerial reasons. At the speculative level, the infoset and its recursions are placed in a series of embedments that runs from the neuron to global governance. The VSM’s principle of recursion is the thread through both, and Beer himself labels the second level an essay in which ideas are “embraced freely” (BD 1994: 248).
23.3 Governance or government
BD ch. 10, “Governance or Government?”, closes Part Two. It does not mention the VSM. It belongs here because it states the political purpose for which the 1990 experiments were designed, gives Beer’s sense of “governance”, and contains, as a political proposal, the recursion of infosets to which 23.2 refers. Beer opens with planetary threat, nuclear and ecological, and concludes that world governance “will be high on humanity’s agenda from now on. The trouble will predictably be that no-one knows how to achieve it” (BD 1994: 163). The League of Nations and the United Nations “both failed dismally to do anything at all about world governance” (ibid.). The briefings for three of the five 1990 experiments gave three reasons: One World organizations are built from power blocs of nation states; some nations are “‘more equal than others’”; and resolutions must “climb up hierarchical ladders” within each state before they reach global negotiation (ibid.). The title names the distinction: “governance is a concept that admits of many possible interpretations and instrumentalities, whereas a government is an entity, and one would expect it to have juridical status” (BD 1994: 164). The occasion is Garry Davis, the self-proclaimed World Citizen, who heads a World Government and had asked Beer to work on his concepts (BD 1994: 164–165). Beer is “cautious of any entity called world government” (BD 1994: 165). If governance could be achieved only by “law and order”, no-one would remain outside that government to question its laws. “Fortunately to a cybernetician, governance is a quality of self-organizing systems, and is not an imposition from outside” (ibid.). He adds that the book “is not a political philosophy” (ibid.). Davis wanted a protocol for a World Convention and saw it, at least at first, as a meeting. Beer “saw it instead as a process, a continuum of activity, in which anyone could take part” (ibid.). The briefing he wrote for the organizing committee “evolved into the 1990 Syntegrity experiments” (ibid.). It argues in a SINCE–THEN form: since the individual is a child of the cosmos and an inhabitant of this planet, a World Convention cannot acknowledge a nation-state format, cannot deal in any hierarchical formulation of the human condition, and cannot accept delegations of negotiators. “In a word, the World Convention could not ‘happen’—it could only ‘be.’” (BD 1994: 166). Two further steps lead to the protocol. Cultural diversity, in Harlan Cleveland’s account, “does not refer to a bunch of nation-states. It refers to a bunch of Infosets” (BD 1994: 167). The usual list of world problems (health, shelter, food, education and so on) is a taxonomy made by academia and power brokers, whereas the World Citizen lives these conditions as one integrated person (BD 1994: 168). The Problem Jostle is therefore asked to isolate twelve issues crucial to survival while avoiding existing taxonomies (BD 1994: 170). Beer defines the unit: “An Infoset is an information set of people who are focused on a common interest, however it is defined” (ibid.). Under the heading “Structure as Process” Beer contrasts architecture, in which relations are fixed in stone, with architectonics, the principles that underlie building (BD 1994: 171–172). “The principles that underlie the practice of management are cybernetic principles”, and “the appropriate cybernetic architectonic for the global problem discussed is the syntegral icosahedron” (BD 1994: 172). He limits the claim at once: syntegration has been shown to work “only in face-to-face situations” (ibid.). The political unit is the neighbourhood infoset of thirty, justified by the redundancy of potential command from BD ch. 9 (BD 1994: 172–173; see 23.1). Linked neighbourhood infosets form the hyperinfoset, “a second level of recursive embedment” (BD 1994: 173; see 22.6). Electronic infosets pose no technical problem, Beer thinks, but the human side of syntegration without physical presence has not been researched (BD 1994: 175). The chapter ends on its title question. The people who could form infosets do not seek world government, “with all its overtones of duress and exploitation at the worst—or of patriarchy and submission at the best” (BD 1994: 176). “What is sought is not an architecture for world government, but the architectonics of world governance. And governance in its multifarious forms is the ultimate topic of this book” (BD 1994: 177). On my reading, the chapter connects with the VSM through two ideas Beer states elsewhere, not through anything he says here: governance as a property of a self-organizing system, and recursion. Chapter 10 itself names neither the VSM nor its subsystems.
References
- BD — Beer, Stafford (1994). Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.