Throughout Beer’s written work on management, this kind of meeting is always emphasised: unstructured, informal connections between staff at different levels and performing different functions. Some of the ephemera — particularly his emphasis on the importance of having adequate supplies of cigars and whisky to facilitate the conversation — might seem comically dated, but the idea of ensuring that there are links across the organisation to spread information and build consensus is entirely modern.

Beer was trying to adapt hierarchical systems so they were fit for their purpose in a changing world. He saw a strict command-and-control approach as dangerously inflexible, while excessive delegation would destroy the organisation’s ability to act as a coherent system. The fundamental relationship between management units in the kind of structures Stafford Beer designed was a ‘resource bargain’. A unit would be allowed to operate autonomously, but only to the extent that doing so did not jeopardise the broader system, whether in terms of a financial budget, physical resources of space, managerial time and bandwidth or general goodwill.

This law states that anything which aims to be a ‘regulator’ of a system needs to have at least as much variety as that system. In order to understand what that means, we need to get a short way into the theory of cybernetics. But for the meantime, for a sort of high-level metaphorical understanding, * think about how you steer various kinds of vehicles. A train can really only go forwards and backwards, so it only needs a single handle. A car can make turns, so its control system requires a steering wheel to represent the added dimension. And an aeroplane needs a joystick rather than a steering wheel, because it can make two kinds of turns. Let’s see where cyberneticians took this idea.

Which to be honest, is often all you really need in these contexts. The whole damn thing* in cybernetics is made of newspapers and high-level analogies. This isn’t computer science, where you can point to the states, bits and circuits on a piece of silicon.

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.

Red-handle signals are problematic for organisations. If they’re being generated frequently, this is an indicator of missing, misidentified or dysfunctional systems further down the organisation. And by their nature, they go from one level of management to another, bypassing the usual systems in between.

Management cybernetics doesn’t give any clues as to how such a profound social change might be achieved, unfortunately. I could make something up, but it would feel like a shabby way to treat you after we’ve come so far together.* My only guess is that it might be that what’s really intolerable about unaccountability is the broken feedback link, and that if we can solve the problem of communicating with the system — pay more attention to the ‘red-handle alert’ mechanisms that indicate an unbearable outcome — people might not be so furious about the death of personal responsibility.

*Particularly Chapter 5, which I promise was a lot harder to write than it was to read.