Thoughts on Cybernetics I wrote for my PhD Supervisors but thought Tumblr would like
I know people on this site love "The purpose of a system is what it does" so here's where that comes from.
Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of control and feedback in systems. In other words, how systems stay in a stable state based on the inputs and feedback they receive. It is relevant to every branch of science and is the origin of the word Cyber. It was first defined by Norbert Weiner in 1943, and adapted for a business and organisational context by his student Stafford Beer in Brain of the Firm (1972).
Important concepts in cybernetics include: -“The purpose of a system is what it does” meaning that if a system is failing to meet its stated goals then that is a result of the current state of the system and it must be changed. -The idea of the “Black Box” meaning many systems are black boxes, too complicated to fully model, and instead should be evaluated by looking at their inputs and outputs, and how external and internal feedback influences them. -The Law of Requisite Variety: The idea that to control a system, the controller must have at least as much complexity of the system it is controlling. A car changes speed and steers, so it needs pedals and a wheel. A plane moves in three dimensions, so it needs a yoke and pedals to give it three dimensions of control. Management must have information complex enough to make informed decisions but not so complex it overwhelms them, and information can be amplified or attenuated to get to the level of variety needed in given situations. Management needs feedback from both the internal and external environment in a form they can quickly understand and react to, and the ability to give feedback to internal systems in an effective manner.
In Brain of the Firm, Beer defines the Viable Systems Model. This is a sort of a “Theory of everything” of management, and nearly every other management theory I have studied neatly fits inside it. It is based on how humans process information and learn. Put simply, an an organisational system will have five elements:
Operations: The people performing the actual functions of the system.
Co-Ordination: Managing resources and dealing with crisis
Tactics: Setting targets and pushing towards them.
Intelligence: Examining external environments and and possible futures to plan ahead
Ethos: Philosophy, Norms, and Beliefs.
Each role can be held by many or multiple people, based on what they actually do and not always job role. They must have communication systems between them that amplify or attenuate information based on the needs of the people. If any of these stop functioning the system will fail. Most interestingly, the system is considered a “Fractal” meaning it is the same at every scale. It can be true for a team, a department, a company, and an industry, all at once, with each Operations element containing an entire viable system inside it. I find nearly every theory I have looked at including Resource Based View, Dynamic Capabilities Theory, Stakeholder Theory, Sociotechnical Systems Theory and most others I studied at undergrad fit nearly inside this framework, and I think it is will be a useful tool to have in my toolbox in terms of setting measurements and examining feedbacks from different stakeholders, as well as scaling down as low as teams and scaling up to the level of trade associations. I have attached a diagram of the model from Wikipedia as it helped me understand the concept.
I have been reading “The Unaccountability Machine” by Dan Davis, which is a pop-book on the topic, that asked why companies and people in them are very often not accountable for their actions, and uses cybernetics to answer this, imagining companies as semi-autonomous cybernetic entities, made of their rules and policies and resulting in outcomes nobody in them expects. I have bought “An Introduction to Cybernetic Synergy” by Mark Rowbotham, which is an academic textbook aimed at helping managers and workers to understand cybernetics and the Viable Systems Model, as Brain of the Firm is considered dense, technical, and has a lot of mathematical models. If I end up using cybernetics as a research philosophy, I will work my way up to Brain of the Firm using these books as stepping stones.
