Foreword

Citation

Espejo, R. (2004), "Foreword", Kybernetes, Vol. 33 No. 3/4. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2004.06733caa.002

Foreword

Following Stafford Beer's death in August 2002, some of us felt the need to organise a meeting to celebrate his life in general and his contributions to knowledge and society in particular. The meeting took place at the London School of Economics on the 3rd March 2003, under the auspices of the LSE's Complexity Research Programme and Syncho Ltd.

The invitation to that meeting said, “Working in the traditions of Warren McCulloch, Norbert Wiener and Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer created and developed organisational cybernetics. He grounded his inventions, among others the viable system model (VSM) and team syntegrity, in his practice as a management scientist, most notably in the political project of the Chilean Government of the early 1970s. He offered a cogent, compelling and enlightened account of this practice in writings such as Decision and Control, Brain of the Firm, Designing Freedom, Platform of Change, The Heart of Enterprise and Beyond Dispute. For us the challenge is to transform his legacy into a growing body of knowledge, contributing to the production of fair societies and organisations and sustainable environments. In this meeting we want to debate and clarify the challenge of this transformation.”

The format of the one-day meeting was invited presentations by academics and practitioners working in organisational cybernetics and applied epistemology and also by a poet. They all agreed to write formal contributions for publication in this issue of Kybernetes. After the event I made a few additional invitations for contributions to people who were close to Stafford and his work. Altogether 19 people contributed to this issue. I do not think I misinterpret them by saying that on the whole they were more interested to offer a tribute to Stafford than to break new grounds in organisational cybernetics; any progress in this direction should be received as a bonus, and not as a primary concern of this issue of Kybernetes. On the other hand, seeing all the contributions together gives a sense of the breadth and depth of some of the work in progress following Stafford's footsteps. But they are not comprehensive. Unfortunately, there is no report of the work in progress using Stafford's team syntegrity. This is an area of research and professional work that hopefully others will write about in the near future.

How readers make sense of the 15 contributions is indeed a very personal matter and most likely there will be as many interpretations as readers. However, I had the task to give them some order. I found that they could be organised in four main strands, before a final part that included some of Stafford's papers, published by Kybernetes from 1999 to 2002.

A first group of papers offers insights about Stafford's work and the strength of his thinking. In his paper, Andrew Pickering explores the history of Stafford's work in management cybernetics, from his early work in the steel industry to the development of the VSM and team syntegrity. In his view Stafford's work makes apparent that the world can always surprise us, and that we can never dominate it through knowledge. David Weir's paper makes use of some of Stafford's ideas in Decision and Control, published in 1966, and argues that they are centrally relevant to the management of crises, catastrophes and disasters in complex socio-technical systems in high technology sectors. He makes apparent that topics such as redundancy, poor structures and weaknesses in information flows are critical for social systems, which typically operate in a degraded mode. Allenna Leonard highlights vividly in her paper one of Stafford's great strengths: his ability to review holistically questions of public importance. She illustrates how the denial of the world's complexity, characteristic of the market economy and religious fundamentalism, produces exclusion and dangerous situations for all. She argues for system models and tools, as offered by Stafford and others, to increase our appreciation of complexity.

A refreshing pause, before proceeding to the second group of contributions, is offered by David Whittaker's review of Stafford poetry. It would appear from Whittaker's contribution that poetry was, among other aspects, a vehicle for Stafford to cross cultural boundaries. Stafford employed Welsh and Sanskrit metre and rhythm to writing in English. He also “transduced” rather than translated into English popular Spanish-language poems.

The second group of contributions is focused on the application of systems thinking in general and the use of Stafford's VSM in particular. Schwaninger and Koerner develop conceptual tools, derived from Stafford's VSM and the St. Gall framework for systemic management, to cope with dynamic complexity in change and development projects. These tools are used in the revision of the Urban Master Plan for the City of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. At a micro-economic level, Steve Brewis's paper is focused on developing system tools to increase businesses' capacity to deal with complexity. He recognises that the management structures of these businesses are, in general, inadequate to handle their operational, moment-to-moment complexity. Improving this situation requires structures that anticipate and mirror this complexity; he suggests that the VSM is particularly appropriate for this purpose. This model is also used by Jose Perez Rios in his contribution to overcome communication difficulties across dispersed communities. He explores and offers a VSM design for an Internet information exchange network. Its purpose is to enable people working in system ideas to form a global virtual community.

A third group of contributions is focused on interventions in companies and government institutions influenced by Stafford's paradigmatic thinking. Authors reflect upon their experiences working with these ideas and make apparent some of the difficulties in bringing about social transformation. Werner Schuhmann offers a senior manager's reflections on experiences with the VSM in different situations. These reflections are based on second order observation; that is on observing the forms of first order distinctions. He recognizes the VSM as a valuable tool to study and change organizations, however, suggests that its “upgrade” may be necessary in the light of epistemological insights such as the logic of distinctions, operational closure and self-reference. Trevor Hilder, based on interventions in different enterprises, and also on historical evidence, argues that tribal behaviours are not only exclusive but also threaten the viability of organisations. Indeed, if this is not considered attempts to reform them will be met with resistance, since the effort will be perceived as an attack against the norms of the organisation. The VSM can be seen as a heuristic to diagnose this kind of behaviours. German Bula's paper offers an account of three processes of organisational transformation in Colombia, driven by organisational cybernetics in general and the VSM in particular. These processes, which started in 1994 and are still in progress, have influenced processes in hundreds of public and private enterprises. His account of these projects highlights not only the relevance of the work within the National Controller's Office (or National Audit Office), in itself a major undertaken, but also the current training at the Universidad de los Andes of hundreds of people in the practices of “observing organisations”. His accounts are accounts of failure and also of success.

A glimpse of Stafford extraordinary humanity is offered by Rebeca Donoso's tribute. This is an account of her first encounter with Stafford in a remote town in the delta of the Magdalena River in Colombia, and the impact of this event in her life afterwards. This paper is one instance of the transformational processes in progress in that country, as described by Bula in the previous paper.

The fourth group of contributions are mainly epistemological, and to a lesser extent methodological, reflections about the VSM. My own paper deals with organisational complexity, seen from the perspective of its unfolding from global to local concerns. Historically this unfolding has produced rigid social systems, where those in power positions have forced unfair constraints over the majorities at the local level, and often excluded them. I argue the need to move towards flexible, fair, social systems, inclusive in character. This transformation requires an increasing appreciation of communication problems in society and the embodiment of social systems. The paper by Roberto Zarama and his colleagues at the Universidad de los Andes is a tribute to Stafford written by people at the periphery of the global context. It argues, following Stafford's cry for systems sensibility, for an ethical stance that is aware of the consequences of our social actions. A contribution to this task is their work at the University de los Andes training qualified observers of social systems (cf. paper by Bula). They give powerful insights about their current research and action. Gerard de Zeeuw's paper offers deep epistemological insights about Stafford's work. His basic question is, what deliverables did Stafford envision when he developed his “science of effective organisation”? The paper answers this question as: the organisations that use the distinctions of the VSM. Such organisations, part of daily life, become knowledge by continuously striving to identify experiences that falsify their existence. This view clarifies the notion of a collective's organisation as a knowledge generator. These are insights that began to be developed by others only much later. Last by no least is Maurice Yolles's contribution; he argues that some aspects of Stafford's work have not been fully recognised. He gets himself in the endeavour of exploring Stafford's paradigmatic contributions, by considering epistemological and ontological angles of his work. Some of the implications of this exploration for Stafford's work are shown to have led to the creation of a virtual paradigm capable of exploring his achievements “externally”, after Gödel.

In part V a collection of Stafford's contributions to Kybernetes, published from 1993 to 2002, have been included.

Of course each of the contributions stands on its own, as an independent, self-contained contribution, however their ordering shows a path, useful to me, to make sense of all of them as a totality. I have included four of Stafford's illustrations as entries to each of the first four parts of this issue of Kybernetes. They were copied from “Reproof of the Soul, Haiku by Vanilla Beer, Illustrated by Stafford Beer” (www.vanillabeer.com), with the permission of the author, herself a painter. In her own words: “we (Stafford and Vanilla) both thought it was funny that he should illustrate a book I had written – swapping roles”.

Finally, I want to thank Allenna Leonard for her collaboration, in many different ways, throughout the editing of this issue.

Raul Espejo