2. Stafford Beer

Later on, Beer would identify it as one of his fundamental axioms: ‘It is not necessary to enter the black box to understand the nature of the function it performs.’ The underlying idea is somewhat stronger than this: if the black box is a complex system, it’s likely to be pointless — or even dangerous — to try to understand its inner workings and use that understanding to manipulate a precise outcome. This is a matter of respecting the complexity of the problem — a genuinely complex system is one in which you cannot hope to get full or perfect information about the internal structure, and cannot have any acceptable degree of confidence that the bits of information you don’t have can be safely ignored. Rather that trying to use a mixture of partial information, preconceived theory and guesswork, you need to step back, accept that the system will keep its secrets, and observe its behaviour. And of course, this means that the different observers might have different opinions. The property of ‘being a black box’ isn’t an objective one — it’s a description of a decision taken by someone working on the system that they don’t have enough understanding to safely treat it in any other way. In some of Beer’s writings, the property of complexity itself is also dealt with in this way; rather than trying to count combinations of connections, you define what it is for something to be a complex system by saying that it’s one which has to be treated as a black box.*

*if you can control something in your factory like a machine, it’s a ‘clear box’ in this language; there are even ‘muddy boxes’, where more detailed analysis could help understand the relationship between inputs and outputs but the system keeps a few secrets because really detailed analysis would require disproportionate effort.

Plenty of organisations have no formally identified central planning department, but the integration and optimisation function is performed by an informal network of System I managers. That’s perfectly possible, as long as they have made the mental leap understanding that from time to time they need to adjust their thinking to perform a coordination role for the benefit of the organisation. Stafford Beer occasionally seemed to suggest that this kind of informal internal networking could be the best way to create System 3, which was why a big lounge at head office with whisky and cigars was important.

The overlapping of different systems — and the tendency of individuals to have different roles at different levels of abstraction — is a key part of Beer’s theory, and one of the main reasons why his diagrams got so complicated. He claims that every ‘viable system’ needs to have all five of the functions described so far in order to be capable of long-term survival, but that every such system can also be seen as System I within a larger system. Similarly, since we defined System I as part of an organisation that could in principle be a viable separate organisation, the internal management of System I needs to have its own equivalents to systems 2, 3, 4, and 5; it needs internal regulation, optimisation and intelligence, and a balancing, identity-preserving function of its own.

Often, when you’re trying to diagnose why a system is failing, you need to consider both the larger system in which it’s embedded and the organisation within its operations. A great source of management problems, for example, is that organisations often fail to identify some of their operations as distinct systems, and so they lack their own internal ‘higher functions’. A division of this sort will generally be a ‘problem child’; unable to absorb its own environmental variability, it will bounce from crisis to crisis, taking up disproportionate time and effort on the part of the middle managers to which it has been assigned.

There is a solution to this kind of problem in the viable system model — Beer emphasises it in his later work, particularly in the parts of the second edition of Brain of the Firm that were written after his experience in Chile. A truly viable system needs to have communication channels that link the operations to higher-level management functions and even to higher levels of recursion. Stafford Beer called these ‘algedonic signals’ — a kind of neurological metaphor, coined from the Greek words for pain and pleasure.

It might be easier, though, to understanding them as the kind of messages sent by the red handle in a train driver’s cab. As well as a physical check on the individual vehicle, the emergency brake sends an organisational message to the whole railway, informing it that a piece of track can’t be used.

And this story repeats itself through the history of management science; almost every classic of the literature seems to have described a way of adapting systems to a more complicated world, and then to have become obsolete itself. If you look past the slogans and think about what things like ‘management by objectives’, ‘focus on core competences’ and so on actually mean, they are all different ways of advising executives to restructure their businesses so that they don’t generate complexity faster than it can be managed.