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STAFFORD BEER (*1926)

by Markus Schwaninger

Professor Stafford Beer, the founder of management cybernetics, is an international consultant in the management sciences.

He has held managerial positions at every level - including those of Production Controller, Director of Management Science, Director of Development, Managing Director, Company President, and Chairman of the Board, in various companies. He is currently Chairman of Syncho Ltd (UK) and Team Syntegrity Inc. (Canada). He has worked at the governmental level ihn twenty-five countries, and for many international agencies.

Stafford Beer has been a visiting professor in more than 20 universities in Britain, Europe and North America, including Manchester (where he lectured for 24 years) and Durham Business Schools, the Open University, the Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania, University College Swansea, and the University of Toronto. Liverpool John Moores University has nominated him Honorary Professor of Organizational Transformation.

Beer is a Past President of the Operational Research Society, and of the International Society for Social Systems Sciences, and has the McCulloch Award of the American Society for Cybernetics, of which he is now a Trustee. Currently he is President of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics, of which he holds the Norbert Wiener Gold Medal.

As an adolescent, Beer fought a conflict between his aims of becoming a philosopher or a mathematician, until, at the age of 18, he suddenly had the insight, that both aims were about the same thing. With his books Cybernetics and Management (London: English Universities Press, 1959) and Decision and Control (Chichester: Wiley, 1965) he laid the foundation for Management Cybernetics thereby building on earlier works of Ross Ashby, Warren McCulloch, Norbert Wiener, and Heinz von Foerster.

Beer's work offers concepts and tools for dealing with high complexity, an ubiquitous issue in organizational life. A set-theoretic model, in which he defined the organizational prerequisites for the viability of systems, was later operationalized in a topological model, known as the ,VSM"-Viable Systems Model (Beer, S.: Heart of Enterprise, Wiley, 1979; Brain of the Firm, 2nd ed., Wiley, 1981; Diagnosing the System for Organizations, Wiley, 1985). In this model, a set of functions is distinguished, which ensure the viability of any living system, - organizations in particular. These functions and their interrelationships are specified in a comprehensive theory, the he propositions of which can be summarized as follows:

1.) An enterprise is viable if and only if it disposes of a set of management functions with a specific set of the interrelationships, identified and formalized in the model:

- System 1: Regulatory capacity of the basic units

- System 2: Attenuation and amplification to damp oscillations and coordinate activities via information and communication

- System 3: Establishing overall optimum among basic units, e.g. via resource bargain

- System 3*: Investigation and validation of information 1-3 and 1-2-3 via auditing/ monitoring activities

- System 4: Dealing with long term and overall outside environment

- System 5: Balance the interaction of `3' and `4', embody supreme rules and norms

2.) Any deficiencies in this system, such as missing functions, insufficient capacity of the functions or faulty interaction between them impair or endanger the viability of the organization.

3.) The viability, cohesion and self-organization of an enterprise depend upon these functions being recursively present at all levels of the organization. A recursive structure comprises autonomous units within autonomous units. Moreover, a viable organization is made up of viable units and it is itself embedded in more comprehensive viable units. Each unit, inasmuch as it is producing the organization's task, rather than servicing or supporting this producing, replicates - in structural terms - the totality in which it is embedded: It has all the functions outlined under (1.), to be able to manage, from start to finish, the processes for the purpose of which it exists. If we take such a viable organization as a ,system-in-focus", depending on the perspective adopted, it ,may have more than one next higher and next lower recursion" (Beer, Diagnosing, 6; for a pertinent application, see Allenna Leonard's paper on commercial broadcasting, in: Espejo/Harnden, eds., The Viable System Model).

His VSM has been transduced into the language of busines and also been widely applied, as documented in several books (e.g. Espejo, R./Harnden, R., eds.: The Viable System Model, Wiley, 1989; Espejo, R./Schwaninger, M., eds: Organisational Fitness, Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 1996; Espejo, R./Schuhmann, W./Schwaninger, M.: Corporate Transformation and Learning, Wiley, 1996).

In the nineties, Stafford Beer has worked on a new model for the design of communication processes, and management processes in particular - the Team Syntegrity Model. This is complemetary to the Viable System Model, and meant to be a concrete approach to the design of the System 3 - System 4 relationship (Beer, S.: Beyond Dispute, Wiley, 1994). Moreover, it is meant to be a model for democratic management.

Team Syntegrity builds on Buckminster Fullers proposition, that all systems are polyhydra. Beer proposes a formal model for an infoset to deal with complex challenges or problems, establishing a protocol based on the structure of polyhedra, the icosahedron (convex polyhedron of 30 edges, 20 triangles and 12 vertices), in particular.

An infoset is a set of people having a common concern and sharing pertinent information or knowledge and enthusiasm about it. Thirty members of the infoset work on the issue, embodying the edges of the icosahedron, each person being a member of two teams of five, respresented by the vertices. Each member of the infoset is also a critic to two other teams.

The protocol, which is also applicable to numbers other than 30, provides a mechanism for a heterarchical generation of the agenda, and a precise structure for the sequence of discussions of teams with their critics. As experiments have demonstrated, the discussion in groups of changing compositions creates a reverberative effect, which fosters group cohesion, and shared mental models. Although the model is highly formalized, it has been applied by many corporations with results that corroborate the experimental evidence.

Author of over two hundred publications, including eleven books variously translated into thirteen languages, Stafford Beer is also a published poet, and has held several exhibitions of paintings.

Beer has himself constructed numerous one-off cybernetic models of such disparate areas as societary triage, health, the dynamics of band development, city planning, education, particular organizations and several models of the integral human personality. Some of theses are described in his book ,Platform for Change, others are written up in ,How Many Grapes Went into the Wine", and in recent publications in journals, e.g. ,Systems Practice" and Kybernetes", and some have not been written up at all.

For the established science of management and administration, Beer's work is highly innovative, and even revolutionary. Therefore, it has only been assimilated to a small extent. However, as the application literature demonstrates, its potential for dealing with the complexities of today's world is enormous. This explains the growing interest in Beers work among practitioners and academics.

Markus Schwaninger, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland St. Gallen, January, 1998

Books by Stafford Beer:

Beer, S. (1959). Cybernetics and Management, London: The English Universitites Press. Also published in Spanish and German.

Beer, S. (1966). Decision and control. The Meaning of Operational Research and Management Cybernetics, Chichester etc: Wiley.

Beer, S. (1994). How Many Grapes Went into the Wine. Stafford Beer on the Art and Science of Holistic Management, Harnden, R. & Leonard, A., eds., Chichester etc.: Wiley.

Beer, S. (1967). Management Science. The Business Use of Operations Research, London: Aldus Books. Also published in Spanish and German.

Beer, S. (1975). Platform for Change, Chichester etc.: Wiley.

Beer, S. (1979). The Heart of Enterprise. Chichester etc.: Wiley.

Beer, S. (1975)Designing Freedom, Chichester etc.: Wiley.

Beer, S. (1983). Transit (Poems), Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island: Mitchell Communications (First edition: 1977, Dyfed, Wales: CWRW Press).

Beer, S. (1985). Diagnosing the System for Organizations. Chichester etc.: Wiley.

Beer, S. & Blohm, H. (1986). Pebbles to Computers, Toronto: Oxford University Press.

Beer, S. (1981). Brain of the Firm. 2nd edition, reprint, Chichester etc.: Wiley (First edition: 1972, London: Penguin Press). Also published in German, Spanish and Japanese.

Beer, S. (1994). Beyond Dispute. The Invention of Team Syntegrity, Chichester etc.: Wiley,

Important note: The Classical Stafford Beer Library is a new edition in paperback of Decision and Control, The Heart of Enterprise, Designing Freedom, Diagnosing the System for Organizations and Brain of the Firm. This series of books is available from Wiley, Chichester, at a special price.