Project Cybersyn

January 2009

• Jan 24
  Bricoleur

  

  Anthony Stafford Beer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  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.

  Anthony Stafford Beer; Cybernetics; Operations research; Project Cybersyn; University of St. Gallen. [1 person]