Stafford Beer’s cybernetics tells us that in these cases, while people’s opinions are important, the facts of the organisational outcomes are what we need to work with. In his most pithy formulation of the principle, he expands the black box principle to a rather more uncomfortable statement.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

An organisation does things, and it systematically does some things rather than others. But that’s as far as it goes. Systems don’t make mistakes — if they do something, that’s their purpose. But it also works the other way around. Systems don’t have inner desires, so they don’t do things intentionally either. There’s just a network of cause and effect. We might think they’re conspiring, but they’re working within structures that made the outcome inevitable. Or we might see everything as a terrible cock-up, but we don’t understand that the outcome was the inevitable result of the way the system works.

Stafford Beer takes an approach to this problem that helps to mark the distinction between information theory and cybernetics. That solution is to say that information and action are one and the same; variety coming in from the environment, or being transferred from one system to another, only counts as ‘information’ if it has a causal role in decision-making. Otherwise it’s just ‘data’ — collections of facts that hang around on disk drives, waiting to be erased* or for the format to become obsolete.

*There are a lot of people is Silicon Valley who might do well to consider how much money they have invested in ‘data’ without bearing this distinction in mind.

This is the whole theory of the firm, according to the Friedman doctrine. There is no analysis of the company as a decision-making system, just individuals making decisions. While modern HR people might talk about ‘bringing your whole self to work’, Milton Friedman explicitly tells the (assumed to be male) modern executive that he has to divide his moral self into judgements ‘as a person in his own right’ and decisions ‘in his capacity as a businessman’.

Corporations are decision-making systems, not ‘intelligences’. They have homeostatic forces which aim to maintain their equilibrium, and higher-order decision-making systems which mean they are able to reorganise themselves in order to respond to shocks beyond the scope of anything anticipated when they were designed. To attribute motivation to them is to make assumptions about the internal workings of the black box — the original intellectual sin of cybernetic analysis.