Anthony Stafford Beer

Cwarel Isaf Institute

| Edit | Posted by: dhcsoul in cybernetics
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“The Cwarel Isaf Institute was founded to make the life's work of Stafford Beer available to society.
Stafford
Beer's thinking and the avenues he opened to solutions are of
fundamental importance to management in complex systems. For the
benefit of organizations now and in the future, the aim is for his work
to be put into a form in which it is understandable and geared to
practical application, and for it to be passed on both to those
actually engaged in management and those who are studying it.

Stafford Beer coined the term POSIWID and used it many times in public addresses. Perhaps most forcefully in his address to the University of Valladolid, Spain in October 2001, he said "According to the cybernetician the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment or sheer ignorance of circumstances."[1]

Viable System Model
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The Viable Systems Model, or VSM is a model of the organisational structure of any viable or autonomous system. A viable system is any system organised in such a way as to meet the demands of surviving in the changing environment. One of the prime features of systems that survive is that they are adaptable. The VSM expresses a model for a viable system, which is an abstracted cybernetic description that is applicable to any organisation that is a viable system and capable of autonomy. It embodies the risk constraints on Development.

Work

Stafford Beer worked in the fields of operational research, cybernetics and management science. He had become aware of operational research while in the army and he was quick to identify the advantages it could bring to business.

Late 1950s he published his first book about cybernetics and management, building on the ideas of Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch and especially William Ross Ashby for a systems approach to the management of organisations.

In the 1970s he also wrote a series of books (the last three focussing upon his own Viable System Model for organisation modeling):

In the 1990s he published one of his last books about Team Syntegrity: a formal model, built on the polyhedra idea of systems for non-hierarchical problem solving.

[edit] Management cybernetics
Sketch for a cybernetic factory, 1959 [2]

Beer was the first to apply cybernetics to management, defining management as the "science of effective organization". Throughout the 1960s Beer was a prolific writer and an influential practitioner in management cybernetics. It was during that period that he developed the viable system model, to diagnose the faults in any existing organizational system. In that time Forrester invented systems dynamics, which held out the promise that the behavior of whole systems could be represented and understood through modeling the dynamical feedback process going on within them. [3]

Management cybernetics is the application of cybernetic laws to all types of organizations and institutions created by human beings, and to the interactions within them and between them. It is a theory based on natural laws. It addresses the issues that every individual who wants to influence an organization in any way must learn to resolve. This theory is not restricted to the actions of top managers. Every member of an organization and every person who to a greater or lesser extent communicates or interacts with it is involved in the considerations.

Stafford Beer Collection

Stafford BeerThe Stafford Beer Collection consists of the personal library of Professor Stafford Beer, the founder of Management Cybernetics, who was appointed Honorary Professor of Organisational Transformation at LJMU in 1989. An international consultant in the management sciences, employed by governments in over 20 countries and by a number of international agencies, Professor Beer, who died in August 2002, was the author of over 200 publications and held a number of academic posts as well as managerial positions at every level. He was also a published poet and held exhibitions of paintings.