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.

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.

The generic solutions are not always bad. A lot of management problem are surprisingly generic: a missing communication channel or a failure to notice that the environment has changed. If the problem is understood correctly, the solution is usually quite simple — it’s likely to be a variation on the same theme of ‘the world has got more complicated and you need to take steps to reconcile that complexity with your capacity to manage it’ that has been the message of management science since Alfred D. Chandler.

But because the solutions are often simple, the work is surprisingly unpleasant. An effective consultant is likely to spend most of their time telling people obvious things that they don’t want to hear. That’s a difficult combination; while not particularly intellectually stimulating, it’s emotionally taxing. It’s not surprising that so many people find doing this intolerable, and consequently let their ethics slip. Telling your client what they want to hear is a better way to get repeat business; the problem won’t go away and the person commissioning the work will still like you.

There’s one sense in which the recording engineers’ maxim is more applicable, though. These are problems of human organisation, and the overwhelming majority of environmental variety of created by humans. The knowledge that something is an organisational problem means that the source of its complexity is the human beings in the organisation. That, in turn, means that the human beings in the organisation have sufficient variety and capability to match the complexity of the problem; the problem can’t be bigger than them, because their own misdirected efforts created it. Only problems that aren’t cybernetic can genuinely be insoluble.*

*One implication of this proposition is that it gives us a rigorous deduction of what would constitute environmental Armageddon — it’s the singularity point at which the problem of climate change ceases to be soluble purely by changing human behaviour and organisation.

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.