Foreword

Citation

Espejo, R. (2011), "Foreword", Kybernetes, Vol. 40 No. 3/4. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2011.06740caa.002

Foreword

Article Type: Progress in organisational cybernetics From: Kybernetes, Volume 40, Issue 3/4

Stafford Beer’s organisational cybernetics is making more sense today than at any time since he published Brain of the Firm in 1972 (Beer, 1981). Key ideas of the viable system model (VSM) such as circular causality, complexity and structural recursion are being understood by a larger number of people. The appreciation of Beer’s work is reflected by the increasing number of blogs referring to his model and by the steady publication of new books and papers related to organisational cybernetics in general and the VSM in particular. And, indeed, Kybernetes has been a significant medium for some of these publications. Once more this journal is offering its agency for the dissemination of this work.

The purpose of this publication, beyond disseminating Beer’s work, is making apparent work in progress and possible future developments. In fact, its purpose is not presenting the state of the art in the application of the VSM, but focusing on issues and research possibilities that are emerging from current work. For this purpose, we start with contributions grounded in Beer’s seminal work in 1970s.

There are those who still get great value from the functional interpretation of the model and in fact in this publication we have four excellent contributions influenced by this interpretation. The model is used to map the complexity of information flows within the system and between this and its environment. Those focused on this interpretation are particularly interested in diagnosing and designing the system through an assessment of whether communication channels are fit to purpose. In my view four contributions have this emphasis and actually offer powerful and valuable insights; the contributions by Christopher, Ben-Ali, and Achterbergh and Vriens take this approach. These are the first four papers in this publication.

Christopher’s contribution explains the structural and managerial improvements that the VSM achieves over the traditional chain of command – hierarchical structure – characteristic of many companies today. In his view, this model goes beyond recognising the need to decentralise companies in business units, something that they already do, but clarifies the information requirements to manage the increasing rate of complexity in today’s world. It is particularly significant how he explains the transformation of an organisation chart into a systemic model. His view is that in this transformation the fundamental structure remains unchanged; what changes is how managers understand the company and how it works. For instance, from this understanding mangers realise that their job is not running but designing their organisation. At the core of his argument is a functional view of the VSM’s sub-systems (i.e. Systems 1-5) and an emphasis in information flows.

Ben-Ali understands the VSM as a powerful template to design real-time information systems. His paper explains the uncompleted, but impressive, implementation of such a system for Libya’s Youth and Sports Ministry in 2007. In carrying out this project, he was inspired by the Cybersyn Project in Chile, but now with all the technological progress that the earlier project had not had. He also had the advantage of more recent methodological developments, such as Checkland’s Soft System Methodology (Checkland, 1981) and the Viplan Method (Espejo and Bowling, 1996). He took a functional view and mapped the Ministry and some other institutional resources onto the VSM, without questioning whether the implied structural recursion was in fact happening. Just like in Chile he was assuming that the real-time information system was going to strengthen the implied managerial levels and induce structural recursion. Unfortunately, he could not make the system operational as political turmoil made the project not viable. However, the methods and tools he used in this project are a contribution to our understanding of the implementation of the model.

Achterbergh and Vriens’ two contributions offer an approach for organisational design by relating Beer’s VSM to the work of (de Sitter et al., 1997), a Dutch management scientist. By recognising the complementarity of these works, they are able to offer a powerful approach for variety engineering. In this discussion, they highlight the functional aspects of Beer’s VSM. However, indeed, it can be argued that the VSM is more than a functional description of complexity management. This is a key point in this publication that is discussed further below.

Beyond the functional understanding of the model, other authors recognise its relevance as a heuristic to work out strategies for transformational communications in effective organisations. These authors are interested in organisational development and transformation and recognise that the problem of communication is far more than the complexity managed through direct interactions; it is also about self-reference and the related processes of self-regulation and self-organisation. In their view, people and organisations are not responding to stimuli as if they were trivial machines (von Foerster, 1984). They are autonomous systems that accommodate disturbances according to their histories and evolutionary contexts. Change and transformation implies far more than individuals and organisational systems responding to their representations of environmental complexity; it implies making sense of disturbances through recurrent interactions (Espejo and Reyes, 2011). And no doubt accounting for these communications requires a different epistemology to that focused on mapping institutional resources onto the model and representing environmental variety. The papers by Garcia, Espejo and Kuropatwa, Espejo and Mendiwelso-Bendek and Losscher illustrate this different interpretation of organisational cybernetics in general and the VSM in particular.

Garcia and Mendoza, from the University of Santiago, Chile, offer an original paper focused on managers that beyond their organisational roles are human beings. While it can be argued that the components constituting an organisation are its roles and not the fully fledged individuals, it is apparent that it is people with their own histories, emotions and affective characteristics that participate in the relationships constituting that organisation. Acknowledging this distinction makes it necessary for organisational participants to criss-cross between their ontology, limited by their bodyhood (their integrated body/mind), and the epistemic characteristics of their roles. In this paper, the authors introduce and apply CLEHES, a methodology for self-observation and observation of other participants, and apply the Viplan methodology to work out and improve the interactions and communications of systemic roles in the organisation. The authors report the successful application of both methodologies in a small information technology enterprise.

Espejo and Kurupatwa’s paper discusses the evolution of a company in Argentina with the support of the VSM and the Viplan Method. This company had a cybernetic intervention in the 1980s and in 2002 went out of business. The authors’ purpose was revisiting the company with the lenses of current organisational cybernetics to find new insights from its history. The 1980s intervention with the VSM assumed that the company’s primary activities (i.e. autonomous units) were those implied by its mission, however, current recollections of its history question that assumption. These recollections suggest that this was a very centralized company were corporate managers made extraordinary efforts to plan local activities from the centre reducing businesses flexibility, making poor use of people’s competencies and failing to produce a recursive organisation. Though a functional application of the VSM may be helpful to highlight communication and information requirements for viability, it yields limited insights about its actual viability. It is the assessment of relationships within the organisation and with environmental agents that offers these latter insights.

Espejo and Mendiwelso-Bendek’s paper is focused on stakeholders’ participation in policy processes in England. It continues with the theme of relationships and argues that for active citizenship, which makes possible effective stakeholders’ influence on policy processes, it is also necessary that policies are supported by effective organisational systems. Strengthening citizens’ competencies is not enough to increase their influence in policy processes. National and local governments’ services are the main communication channel between stakeholders and policy-makers and if policy making and implementation are fragmented then the stakeholders’ views about these services will not reach policymakers. Thus, the argument goes, to increase stakeholders’ influence it is necessary not only to increase their competencies, but also to recognise institutional fragmentation and improve structural communications. This argument is illustrated with reference to programmes for active citizenship in the UK and an instance of the government’s inadequate response to a recurrent service delivery failure.

Leadership is a key relationship in organisations; what is that makes a person a leader and how can he/she benefit from an appreciation of variety engineering is the focus of Losscher’s paper. Naturally leaders, as any other person, constitute amplifiers and attenuators of complexity in their relations with other people. In this contribution Losscher uses Chemers’s (2000) integration of image management, relations development and resource deployment as the building blocks of leadership and reflects upon their meaning from the perspective of variety engineering. His implied argument is that by mapping these blocks onto amplifiers and attenuators of variety it should be possible to provide a platform to improve leadership practices. Losscher interprets from the perspective of variety management aspects such as building up responsible trust, making apparent a deep appreciation of the language of complexity. This paper is an early attempt to observe leadership from the perspective of complexity and opens the gates for further research in this important topic.

The focus of the contributions by Harwood and by Ototsky and Manenkov is on the relevance of organisational cybernetics on strategy and structure. They neither use the VSM in particular situations nor attempt to explain it. Both have got insights from studying the model and in their contributions discuss strategic issues; one for enterprises of any kind and the other for regional government in Russia.

Harwood’s paper attempts to bridge business strategy and organisational cybernetics to promote the view that they usefully enrich each other. The author is aware that little attention is given to organisational cybernetics in mainstream business strategy and wants to redress this omission. The paper reviews on the one hand the resource-based view of strategy, the strategy-as-practice approach and the strategy-structure debate and on the other organisational cybernetic concepts as contributors to an understanding of strategy. The paper argues that being an organisation’s structure defined by its dynamically related resources, its strategy is embodied in on-going relations and not in documents however smart they might be, and recognises that this view of strategy depends on effective structures such as those proposed by the VSM. This model provides a systemic heuristic for strategising. Harwood, among other aspects, points at the complementarity of current work in dynamic capabilities (Teece, 2008) and the VSM to promote synergy between business strategy and organisational cybernetics. As an illustration of this complementarity the paper explains aspects of the VSM that would enlighten a merger process between two companies.

Ototsky and Manenkov’s paper is a contribution of scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences that reflects on problems of complexity management. Though the authors’ approach is focused on mathematical modelling techniques, they make apparent that their interest goes beyond subject-object modelling, that is, beyond modelling black boxes as if they were trivial machines, and focus on subject-subject modelling, that is, in on open modelling and implementation techniques that involve stakeholders in intervention processes. In particular, the paper emphasises the role of cognitive centres, built along the lines of Stafford Beer’s Operations Room in Chile and Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition. Though not explicitly said in the paper it is possible to infer through their reference to the cybernetic (Viplan) methodology that these centres are not there to forecast the future but to strengthen social structures to increase their resilience in front of an increasing rate of change. Are existing social/organisational structures able to cope with this rate of change? They are using epistemological and methodological tools grounded in systems thinking and organisational cybernetics to build up effective cognitive centres at a regional level in Russia.

The emphasis of the final two papers in this publication is self-organisation. The first by Espinosa et al., discusses the complementarity between the VSM and complex adaptive systems. The second, by Holten and Rosenkranz, explores the role of linguistic communication for self-organisation. Both papers open the gates for new research in organisational cybernetics.

Espinosa, Cardoso, Arcaute and Christensen’s paper reflects upon results of recent research about the self-organisation of an eco-community in Ireland. This community is currently striving for its regeneration and improved sustainability. The paper explains the researchers’ empirical findings about the self-organisation and self-transformation of this community, over a period of several years, using a combination of the VSM (Beer, 1979) and complex adaptive systems (Richardson, 2008). The paper describes the methodological framework used to conduct the action research and reflects upon the complementarity of the approaches used and the lessons learned in the process. In particular, by mapping the organisational dynamics and the structural changes decided by the community members it was possible to show interesting insights about emergence and self-organisation.

The contribution of Holten and Rosenkranz opens significant new grounds and avenues for future research. They use the VSM and linguistic predication to develop a highly innovative framework to design amplifiers and attenuators of complexity in an organisation. The VSM provides a way to understand an organisation’s communication structures and linguistic predication provides a way to understand how to bridge communication gaps between the different linguistic communities that are natural to any organisation. These linguistic communities emerge from processes of self-organisation. The challenge is enabling functional processes of self-organisation, consistent with the organisation’s purposes, and for this the VSM offers design criteria. It is in this sense that effective self-organization relies on designing effective structures. Most significantly, the communication bridges are transducers relating actors with different functional responsibilities within an organisation. Visualising these transducers helps designing variety attenuation of operations and variety amplification of management to establish requisite variety between systemic functions. For instance, standardised languages permit meaningful communications between functions with minimal exchange of symbols, decreasing the cost of coordination. As the authors say this paper addresses the questions:

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  to what extent the design of amplifiers and attenuators is possible if these are realized based on linguistic communication; and

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  whether this design can be automated in these cases.

The paper demonstrates that linguistic predication is not computable based on the model of the Turing machine so that this operation is restricted to be carried out by human agents. In these cases, technology is limited to providing a technical means for communication and social processes.

Finally, it is useful to add a few additional words about the epistemological differences between the functional and communicative appreciations of the VSM. Indeed, it is different to understand an organisation as a black box performing a transformation or as a human communication system emerging from the structural couplings of actors and agents (Maturana and Varela, 1992). However, these two interpretations are complementary; the first, the black box description, is necessary to work out systemic strategies to produce whatever transformation an organisation is or wants performing; the second, the operational (communicative) description, is necessary to work out strategies for learning and transformation when change is desirable and necessary (Espejo and Reyes, 2011).

The black-box description helps seeing – through structural models – (Espejo and Bowling, 1996) constraints restricting the spaces for communications. The use of particular structural models has implications for the chunking of the organisation’s complexity. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to perform any significant task without its decomposition into smaller self-contained tasks. This is the organisation’s unfolding of its complexity. However, if this chunking is not done insightfully it can generate unnecessary fragmentation with undesirable consequences. This happens when the systemic context for different chunks is not recognised and is left to self-organisation without the benefit of designing necessary relations to enhance their viability; this is a common problem for public policies. This chunking can also generate fragmentation when the systemic context of the chunks is recognised but managing their interdependencies is poorly designed and therefore becomes too complex and costly. For instance, the traditional functional structure of companies leaves the corporate level responsible for the integration of many relatively simple tasks, increasing the risk, in a non-coercive situation, of a fragmented development of corporate functions. The very complex network that is required at the corporate level to integrate the relatively simple functional tasks becomes impossible or too costly. Once the network’s complexity exceeds the organisation’s capacity to maintain its functions together, it risks fragmentation. This problem is experienced by many companies as the complexity of their business transformation grows. The alternatives are going either for complex networks of simple tasks or for simple networks of complex tasks. This issue is clearly explained in Achterbergh and Vriens contributions, and furthermore they offer a design heuristic based on de Sitter’s work, which is powerful and of significance for organisational design. From a design perspective this was the strategy used by many large corporations as they evolved towards structures based on strategic business units.

Unfortunately, the black-box description is often equated with managers controlling the organisation from the outside implying the traditional hierarchical organisational structure. This description suggests structures that attenuate the complexity of their people so that they comply with the views of those in power; these workers receive information to act but do not construct their own meanings for their tasks. The ineffectiveness of this managerial approach is illustrated for the enterprise SUR in Espejo and Kurupatwa’s paper. However, the problem with SUR was the relational strategies created by its owners within the company, and not the fact that they had to chunk its business transformation in multiple “black boxes” as is illustrated in the paper. Designing this chunking is a fundamental strategy that de Sitter’s approach and Espejo’s Viplan help doing. But, viability requires more than simple networks of complex tasks (i.e. an effective chunking of the overall transformation); it requires for each of these tasks relationships that allow their effective implementation and adaptation. This kind of description is precisely the complementary operational description that is discussed by Espejo both with Kurupatwa and Mendiwelso-Bendek in their contributions to this publication.

An organisation’s operational description is better related to the structural couplings between actors and between these and environmental agents. Are these couplings supporting the autonomous unfolding of the organisation’s complexity? Are they supporting the environmental stretching necessary for adaptation? Regulation in this case has a very different connotation to a manager’s unilateral control of a black box or an organisation’s representing and responding to its environment; it is all about communications, accommodation and mutual influence. However, the chunks produced by the black-box description define the boundaries and constraints within which operational descriptions need to be observed. We could say that this complementary description transforms black boxes into lively non-trivial machines (von Foerster, 1984), bubbling with complexity. For them information is not enough for transparency; as argued before it is appreciating the quality, or lack of it, of the necessary communications for viability that makes them transparent.

The scene is now set for readers to go through this publication. Any views about it are welcome; I would be delighted to receive your comments.

Finally, I want to thank Professor Brian Rudall, the Editor in Chief of Kybernetes, for his invitation to produce this publication.

Raul EspejoGuest Editor