slimmed down, dumbed down

a minimum viable viable systems model product

A gratifying, albeit terrifying, experience since writing the book has been that people have written to me saying “how would you recommend actually implementing this model?”.  Other people have also written to me saying “I remember trying (or, my grandad remembers trying) this stuff in the 1970s and it didn’t seem to work”.  I’m noticing a pattern in my responses which maybe ought to have been in the book, except I didn’t really understand it until I started talking to readers.

Basically, in many ways the trouble with Management Cybernetics is that it had too much of a specific system.  Even “Diagnosing The System For Organisations” is pretty tricky reading with a lot of exercises to go through and diagrams to understand and memorise.  And that was meant to be Stafford Beer’s guide to practitioners, written up from his lecture notes for a course at Concordia University.  I keep saying that “rocket science” is a good analogy, because everyone basically understands that the principle of a rocket is Newton’s Third Law and what makes it complicated is the plumbing.  But cybernetics seems to have modelled itself more on brain surgery – you need to memorise a load of complicated structure before you can dare to make a single incision.

So, my initial advice would be that the way to actually do a cybernetic analysis of a problem would probably be along the lines of “just do the normal analysis you were planning on doing, but keeping in mind the basic ideas that the information balance sheet has to balance, with sources of environmental variety roughly matched to capability and bandwidth in the control system”.  That’s roughly along the same lines that were so successful for economics – there’s really not much to “thinking like an economist” beyond “try and remember that there are opportunity costs and take incentives into account, otherwise as you were”.  And I’d guess that the biggests real benefit of both systems of thought would be the implicit “remember that the thing you’re interested in is likely to be part of a wider system, and changes to your bit will have further effects”.

Is it possible to do better than that?  I think maybe yes.  The following checklist is adapted from the one in “Creative Problem Solving” by Flood & Jackson (hahaha look at the prices of academic books), and I think they make a reasonable case that these are the most common problems to find in a Viable Systems Model analysis:

·        Signals simply aren’t being transmitted between different systems, or the capacity to translate them into action hasn’t been maintained, or they aren’t being transmitted fast enough.

·        An important operational subsystem hasn’t been identified as such, and consequently doesn’t have internal management structures of its own

·        An administrative subsystem that ought to be serving the direct operations has started to act as if it was a viable entity on its own and started to function at the expense of the overall system  rather than for its benefit.

·        The regulatory structures (timetables, inventory control, etc) which are meant to stop the operations getting in the way of each other are being ignored or destroyed by operational managers who find them annoying or inconvenient.

·        The intelligence function is weak and regarded as a “staff” or “head office” function rather than being integrated into the “line” management.

·        The highest level “philosophy” function isn’t performing its role of balancing present and future demands, usually because it’s got too involved in day-to-day management because the intelligence function is weak.

·        “Line” management are interfering with the detail of operations rather than performing their co-ordinating and optimising role.

If any of these statements are true about an organisation, then you have a “that’s yer problem right there” moment – the principle of information capability matching (Ashby’s Law) isn’t being respected, and the consequences are likely to be similar to forgetting about the expansion of gases in a rocket.

Can we do even better than this? I’d hesitate to say it’s not possible.  The people at Metaphorum and Malik think they can have success with a full-on use of Beer’s model, and I’m not in any position to gainsay them.  But in my view, if there’s going to be any real chance of success for cybernetic ideas in the mainstream, it’s going to be based on the very simplest version.  Stafford Beer himself said that Ashby’s Law stood in relation to cybernetics as the Laws of Motion did to mechanics; it’s a slimmed-down version, not dumbed down.