The Unaccountability Machine— Dan Davies

Part 1: The Nature of the Crisis

1.Something’s Up

““Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers.”

George Orwell, ‘James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution’,1946

If a manager or management team doesn’t have information-handling capacity at least as great as the complexity of the thing they’re in charge of, control is not possible and eventually, the system will become unregulated.

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.

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.