|
p.3 It took the author 30 years to develop the Viable System Model, which sets out to explain how systems are viable – that is, capable of independent existence. He wanted to elucidate the laws of viability in order to facilitate the management task, and did so in a stream of papers and three (of his ten) books.
p.5 there is no way of ‘proving’ a model: the by now classical criterion of ‘falsifiability’ remains instead.
p.6 The management of any viable system poses the problem of managing complexity itself, since it is complexity (however generated) that threatens to overwhelm the system’s regulators.
p.6 The notion of a ‘coenetic variable’ explains the delimitation of the variety of environmental circumstances and of apparently regulatory responses at the same time (Sommerhoff, 1950). Sommerhoff wrote (see Figure 2): Coenetic (pronounced ‘sennetic’, from the Greek meaning ‘common’) variables simultaneously delimit variety as shown, so that trajectories of the system converge on to a subsequent occurrence. Sommerhoff called this ‘directive correlation’.
p.7 ‘Often one hears the optimistic demand: “give me a simple control system; one that cannot go wrong”. The trouble with such “simple” controls is that they have insufficient variety to cope with variety in the environment. Thus, so far from not going wrong they cannot go right. Only variety in the control system can deal successfully with variety in the system controlled.
p.7 It has always seemed to me that Ashby’s Law stands to management science as Newton’s Laws stand to physics; it is central to a coherent account of complexity control. ‘Only variety can destroy variety.’
p.7 Monetary controls do not have requisite variety to regulate the economy. The Finance Act does not have requisite variety to regulate tax evasion. Police procedures do not have requisite variety to suppress crime. And so on. All these regulators could be redesigned according to cybernetic principles
p.8 a viable system survives under considerable perturbation because it can take avoiding action, because it can acclimatize, because it accommodates, because it is adaptive, and so on.
p.11 These difficulties are not indications that the VSM ‘doesn’t work’: the model does not create the problems that it makes explicit. Rather does it enable managers and their consultants alike to elaborate policies and to develop organizational structures in the clear understanding of the recursions in which they are supposed to operate, and to design regulatory systems within those recursions that do not pretend (as do so many of those we employ) to disobey the fundamental canons of cybernetics.
p.11 The fact is, however, that either we have a theory of viability, meaning ‘capable of independent existence’, or we have not.
|
