Stafford Beer – Celebration of a life

Citation

(2003), "Stafford Beer – Celebration of a life", Kybernetes, Vol. 32 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2003.06732daa.003

Stafford Beer – Celebration of a life

A celebration on the life of Stafford Beer was held at the Royal Society of Arts in London, United Kingdom on Friday, 11th October 2002. The condolences of the publishers of Kybernetes, its Patron, the Editorial Advisory Board Members and the Editorial Team have already been sent to Dr Allennna Leonard and the family of Professor Beer. It is hoped that special commemorative issues of this journal will be published “in memoriam” in the 2003/4.

We publish in this issue the text that was distributed at the celebration:

Stafford Beer, 25 September 1926 – 23 August 2002

• •

  Caminante no hay caminoSe hace camino al andar

  Walker there is no roadThe road is made as you walk

Stafford was always fond of Antonio Machado’s Cantares; he translated them from the Spanish in his poetry collection “ On the Move” and often quoted these lines, recognizing the inherent truth in them and their reflection of his own experience of life. He was a true pathfinder; curious about almost everything and under no illusions about the implications of our accelerating rate of change. He read widely and sought out people to learn from to educate himself in intellectual matters; he pursued spiritual development all his life; at first in the context of the church and later by study and meditation. When younger, he sang and took part in school drama. Later under-the pressure of time and travel, he concentrated on the more solitary activities of painting and poetry. retaining a lovely bass voice and, until his stroke in 1995, beautiful calligraphic handwriting.

Stafford was born in 1926, the year of the general strike in Britain that had been so bitter that many wondered whether the British would feel they had enough of a common stake in the country to resist Hitler. Just before his 19th birthday, he and his unit in India were preparing themselves for an invasion of Japan when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He found himself, still in the Army, as Staff Captain, Intelligence, and after partition back in London as an Army Psychologist doing operational research – a field that had not even existed before the war. He did not flinch when he looked at the world and told us what he saw. Stafford seemed uncannily accurate in his predictions, until you remembered that he always said that he never predicted anything that had not already begun to unfold. He married Cynthia Hannaway, while still in the army. They had five children: Vanilla, Simon, Mark, Stephen and Matthew.

After completing his Army service, Stafford became one of the young men to try to take operational research into industry. He joined Samuel Fox, and later its parent company, United Steel and headed its operational research and cybernetics group with a professional staff of more than 70 people. He met and became friends with the pioneers of Cybernetics, especially Warren McCulloch, his special mentor, Ross Ashby and Norbert Wiener, who called him the Father of management cybernetics. His first book, “Cybernetics and Management” was published in 1959. During this time,. his research into neurophysiological models led to the development of his Viable System Model, and laid the groundwork for what was to become his Team Syntegrity group decision making process. He worked with Gordon Pask, another young British Cybernetician on possibilities for using selforganizing systems that would not require their circuitry to be designed in detail to form a fabric of communication. They experimented with colonies of fireflies, euglena, daphnia and, most successfully, pond life. The idea was that they could superimpose a signal reflecting a cybernetic function and have a model that would provide results by constraining a high variety system.

After 13 years at United Steel, Stafford was approached by Metra International to launch the science in general management SIGMA, the first OR consultancy in Britain. He next moved to the International Publishing Corporation as Director of Development, where he sponsored research into print and electronic publishing and holography. In 1966, his Intemational Data Highways group established stockbroker computer answering system (SCAN) a commercially viable service to remote terminals. In 1969, he married Sallie Steadman, a widow with a young daughter, Kate. There were two children from this marriage: Polly and Harry.

In 1970, Stafford decided to work independently, consulting in North America, Europe, India and South America. His outstanding commission, from President Salvador Allende was to be named Scientific Director of a project to manage Chile’s social economy as a real-time information system. By the time of the CIA sponsored coup on 11 September 1973, 75 percent of the nationalized industry was brought into the system with economic information not more than a day out of date. Many critics at the time, dismissed this claim as impossible, based on the assumption that project Cybersyn ran on a traditional massive data base. They did not reckon on the selectivity of cybernetic modeling, particularly the Viable System Model, that limited data reported to the next level to around a dozen indices. In total, the Chilean models encompassed 11 levels of recursion from the shop floor to the national economy.

The Chilean coup, and the murder and torture of thousands, some of whom had become personal friends were a serious blow. After a year spent in trying to help Chilean colleagues to find positions abroad where they would be safe, Stafford decided to make a change in his life. He renounced most of his material possessions in favor of his family and moved to a two- room stone cottage in mid Wales. It had electricity but no mains water, telephone or central heating. He wrote “Heart of Enterprise” there as well as extending his “Brain of the Firm” to include an account of the Chilean work. Because of the need to meet financial obligations to his family, he continued to consult and to teach as a visiting professor at the Manchester University Business School in the UK and the Wharton School in Philadelphia, PA among others.

From his student days at Whitgift, and his experience in the Army with men from many walks of life, Stafford’s politics have been progressive. After Suez, and even more after Chile, he became disenchanted with the ability of the so-called establishment to look honestly at the situations before them and respond according to its own stated principles. He analyzed and criticized both the absence of political and economic justice in the world and the poverty of public and political debate. He was especially frustrated at the insistence of authorities that complex situations could be resolved by simple means. In one paper, he coined a word “culpabliss” to stand for culpable and willful ignorance of the certainty of unintended outcomes to poorly thought out programmes. But he was also committed to action. He advised people trying to improve the political process in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Uruguay. Many became personal friends.

He also worked to incorporate democracy into group decision making. His design of the Team Syntegrity process was based on the need to provide requisite variety to the discussion of common issues. Syntegration is a non-hierarchical process where everyone plays an unique and equivalent role. He believed that cascading Syntegrations of 30 people each could provide an effective answer to the lack of requisite variety and of participation in public debate. His insistence that Syntegrations begin with an unconstrained focus and that the participants themselves develop the agenda was testimony to his belief that we must make the road as we walk and that people of goodwill can come up with the best answers for their own problems.

Canada held many happy memories, including his 1973 Massey Lectures (published as Designing Freedom), his keynotes for the Couchiching Conference and Toronto 2000, and a long relationship with (then) Ernst and Whinney. He was pleased when friends invited him to Toronto in 1984 to take up a position as visiting cybernetician in residence at the McLuhan Coachhouse. Additional assignments in Canada were accepted and in 1986, he became a landed immigrant. He and his partner and colleague Allenna Leonard lived in a small house on Palmerston Square. Stafford continued to travel back and forth to Wales to fulfill visiting professorships, to see his family and to spend quiet time in the cottage.

Stafford and Allenna enjoyed their time in Toronto, in Wales and in his many visits for teaching and consulting. He was especially fond of long lunches with his friends lubricated by white wine spritzers. He never lost his interest in new experiences and was always happy to see a new play at Shaw or Stratford, or an exhibition of something he had never seen before at the museum. He was generous with his time and interest and believed that it is privilege to encourage younger (and older) people as his mentors had encouraged him. With love and humour, he encouraged people not to settle for limited concepts of themselves and what they could do; and to value themselves and their divine spark.

Last January, Stafford was admitted to hospital with multiple symptoms. He suffered additional complications from pneumonia before he was finally diagnosed last May as suffering from a bacterial infection, osteo otitis, which had damaged the facial nerves on his left side. Once diagnosed, he was treated with anti-biotics and hyperbaric therapy – measures that have proven effective in combating this condition. Unfortunately, his problems with aspiration did not subside and he had a final and fatal crisis. In recognition of the efforts of the hyperbaric team and the potential of this treatment, donations may be made to the Canadian Council on Clinical Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, 3 Mutual Street, Toronto M5B 2A7.

© Chris Cullen

Editor’s NoteWe are grateful to the organisers of the Celebration, and in particular to Chris Cullen for permission to publish this text.