5.7 Developing a VS method through the viable systems model and Viplan

World leader in the development of operational research, who combined management systems with cybernetics

by Dick Martin and Jonathan Rosenhead

Professor Stafford Beer, who has died aged 75, was a remarkable figure of British operational research (OR) – the study of systems that emerged from deploying newly invented radar in the late 1930s, and has since found extensive management applications.

A charismatic, even flamboyant, character, Beer founded two major pioneering OR groups; wrote some of the best books about it; and was a world leader in the development of systems ideas. He is widely acknowledged as the founder of management cybernetics, which he defined as ‘the science of effective organisation’.

His thinking on how decisions about complex social systems could best be made went through several phases. As an operational researcher he pioneered the idea of interdisciplinary teams to tackle problems in business, government and society. As a systems guru, he was concerned with designing appropriate feedback loops within social systems. More recently, he worked on participative methods to enable large groups to solve their own problems. What united these aspects of his work was his early and consistent commitment to a holistic approach.

He began a degree in philosophy and psychology at University College London, but in 1944 left it incomplete to join the army. He saw service as a company commander and in intelligence in India, and stayed there until 1947, leaving the army with the rank of captain in 1949.

He realised that OR, so successful during wartime, also had immense possibilities in peacetime. Appointed to a management position in a steel company, he soon persuaded it to set up an OR group, which he headed. The group grew to over 70 professionals, carrying out studies across United Steel.

In 1961 he left to launch SIGMA (Science in General Management Ltd), which he ran in partnership with Roger Eddison. This was the first substantial operational research consultancy in the UK. Its staff numbered some 50 before Beer left in 1966 to join the International Publishing Corporation (IPC), which had been a SIGMA client. IPC was then the largest publishing company in the world, and Beer was appointed development director. In this role, he pushed IPC into new technologies, many IT-based. He coined the term ‘data highway’, 30 years before ‘information highway’ came into vogue.

From 1970 he operated as an independent consultant. For over two years, until Chile's President Allende was overthrown in 1973, Beer worked on a new cybernetics-based control system to be applied to the entire social economy of Chile. This was to be a real-time computerised system, an extremely ambitious project given the technology then available.

Although the Pinochet coup prevented the full realisation of the system, Beer later undertook commissions for the presidential offices of Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela, answering directly to the president in the latter two. His recognition was always greater abroad than at home, where the British establishment was uncomfortable with his big vision and radical orientation.

From the publication of his first book, Cybernetics and Management (1959), a systems approach to the management of organisations was his central concern. In this he built on the foundations of cybernetics laid down by Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby, and his mentor Warren McCulloch. A series of four books based on his Viable System Model were published during the 1970s, of which The Brain Of The Firm is the most celebrated.

In the 1990s he turned his attention to a complementary approach, introduced in his 1994 book Beyond Dispute: The Invention Of Team Syntegrity. Team Syntegrity is a participatory method for enlisting the creativity of substantial groups to develop solutions to shared issues. Non-hierarchical and democratic, it has been widely adopted, with a growing international network.

His impact on the way we think about management and systems was the result both of his magnetic personality, and the power of his writing. His prizewinning 1966 book Decision and Control charms the reader with its style as well as content. In this, as in his other writing, he takes an expansive view of his subject. His approach was always challenging, even subversive to conventional decision-making. Radically then, and unfashionably now, he believed in the benefits of a scientific approach, though he railed against reductionism. Unlike other management writers, he saw science as freeing thought and action, not trapping it in narrow procedures and techniques. It was his constant theme that the greatest possible autonomy of action should be maintained at all levels of the organisation, not just at the top.

Beer was a larger than life character. He was tall, broad, brimful of energy, and, in later years, bearded like an Old Testament prophet. His enthusiasm for life could be over-powering and quite non-Anglo-Saxon. Those who encountered him polarised between the group that was distrustful of what it saw as his showmanship, and those who were converted into permanent admirers. He was deeply loyal and affectionate to his friends.

Biological scientists […] logicians, engineers, psychiatrists – all these and others, too, were finding roads which led to the same basic topic: the notion of control itself. Gradually some of those concerned began to realize, through the terrible barrier constituted by their different professional languages, that they were talking about the same thing.

This group of scientists originally centred around the dynamic figure of the American mathematician, Norbert Weiner. By 1947, they had decided that their work had indeed uncovered a new field of scientific endeavour, and they named the science cybernetics. A story attributed to Weiner describes how this underlying unity existed in various different sciences.

Two members of the group had been designing a machine to enable the blind to read. It was not a new idea that a photo-cell could be used to scan a line of print, and to produce variable audible tones which would in some way represent the letters and words concerned. If a means could be found of combining the sounds produced in this way into patterns, patterns that would be as easily recognized as the visual shapes on the page, blind people who were not deaf could be taught to read ‘with their ears’. The main difficulty in this idea is that the pattern of sound must be substantially the same for a given pattern of letters, whatever the size of the print. The apparatus proposed by these two men involved selective reading by an automatic scanning process. A schematic diagram of the lay-out of the machine, with its banks of photo-cells and oscillators, was prepared. The diagram, quite unexplained, came, according to Weiner, to the attention of an eminent anatomist who belonged to his group. He asked: ‘Is this a diagram of the fourth layer of the visual cortex of the brain?’

That is an early example of the way in which a theory of control began to arise from the merging of established sciences. Who could fail to be excited by the fact that these two men, who knew little of each other's professional fields, had the same formal insight into so deep a question? Nor was this synthesis of ideas to prove a futile coincidence. The scientists, stimulated by the incident, produced a theory about the anatomy of the part of the brain dealing with vision, and its physiology, in terms of a mathematical description of a scanning process.