education-cybernetics (5)

Chapter 4
Viability
Systems are nested within other systems; the observer who
imputes purpose to a system belongs to several of them, and is
excluded from others. Thus his perception of purpose in any one
system is not only subjective, not only conditioned by his
acceptance or rejection of boundaries, but is also a function of
the relationships that he maintains across the complicated webs
of interactive systems, one with another.
Stafford Beer
4.1 The Mystery of Hierarchy
Most human institutions - churches, schools, universities, armies,
governments, corporations and scout groups - are organised hierarchically.
That means there is a boss at the top (a highpriest,
king, vice-chancellor, president, rector) and there are
departments below them, each with a head, and under each
division there are divisional-heads, with umpteen sub-divisions
under them, when finally there are individual workers whose
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function is to ensure that their divisional head can’t be blamed
for anything. The hierarchy is a mechanism for apportioning
blame.
Universities use the same structure for the dual purpose of
apportioning blame and structuring knowledge. The fact that
these two functions are incommensurable is impossible to challenge
within the university’s structures. The head of an academic
department is in trouble if their students complain, or
(worse) they don’t sign-up and this blame is apportioned irrespective
of the merits of the particular branch of knowledge they
represent. In the modern university, knowledge must be popular
if it is to survive in the University hierarchy.
In a hierarchy, each higher layer must coordinate the activities
of each lower layer. This means that each divisional head must
grasp the complexity of all that is happening in the layers below
them, which might threaten them. Because the complexity of
the body of staff for whom the manager is responsible is greater
than the manager’s complexity, the manager must attenuate the
complexity of the behaviour of the lower layers by Ashby’s Law.
In modern organisations, the attenuation process is driven by
information: data on everything from class attendance, student
surveys, pass rates and student fee income. Impressive though
this range of data is, and hypnotic is the capacity of modern data
analytic software, the simple fact remains that such information
is always constraint - it is always a tool of attenuation. This
should lead us to worry about what gets left out - for it is usually
what gets left out which suddenly reveals itself as a menacing
force from nowhere and shocks hierarchies into existential panic.
Such is the story of most of our recent institutional crises from
the financial collapse of banks and corporations, child abuse in
the church, illegal behaviour of journalists, Jimmy Savile, health
scandals and MP expenses.
Hierarchies are uncommon in nature. The brain is not the
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4.2 Heterarchy
boss of the body. The body comprises multiple components
which work together coordinated by signals passed through the
central nervous system. Neither is the queen bee the boss of the
hive, or the termite colony led by a “head termite”. In nature,
in place of hierarchy, we see circularity. This is because natural
structures seek viability and adaptability in response to a
changing environment. Circular organisational structures help
achieve this through continual organic adaptation.
Human hierarchy is an anomaly in nature. Speculation as
to why it exists leads to explanations invoking “human nature”,
but the description of what hierarchy does in attenuating provides
a clue as to the deeper reason why it exists. Unlike the
human body, society’s nervous system is wired to attenuate: hierarchy
appears amidst communicative failures. The promise of
technology is that this incapacity might be overcome.
4.2 Heterarchy
The internet was designed non-hierarchically: it was a heterarchy,
providing many possible routes for messages to be communicated
across the network. This architecture, designed to
withstand a nuclear attack, was itself inspired by the architecture
of the brain, providing what Warren McCulloch called a
“redundancy of potential command”.
In a heterarchy, no single node has power over any other node
in a structure. However, this does not mean that collections
of nodes may not organise themselves to perform specific and
distinct functions. The human body is a heterarchy, but the
cells of the body organise themselves in specific functional units
- whether in the brain, the heart, the liver and so on. As our
understanding of the plasticity of stem cells is beginning to tell
us, at the core of biological systems is the adaptability of the
cell which continually adapts to complex environments.
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The word Hetararchy was first introduced by Warren McCulloch
through his study of the brain, and his attempt to establish
similar structures in electronic components - work that laid the
foundations for neural networks and machine learning. In Mc-
Culloch’s neural networks, no node was more powerful than any
other node. The interconnections between the nodes meant that
each node could perform a simple function which could collectively
articulate a logic. Today we use this logic of neural networks
for image recognition, machine translation and automatic
essay marking (more on that later!)
It is in understanding the connection between interconnection,
heterarchy and power that mystery of hierarchy can be understood,
and the potential role of technology in addressing it can
be explored.
4.3 The Organisation of education
To study technology in education is to consider the ways communication
occurs in educational institutions. Given the connection
between lines of communication and organisational structure,
this means that the object of scrutiny in educational technology
is not software, hardware or pedagogy - it is the institution of
education as an organism.
Education is hierarchically organised, and its organisation is
facilitated through the use of tools. Timetables, teachers, curricula,
buildings, assignments, exams, lunchbreaks, textbooks,
pens and whiteboards are all manifestations of educational organisation.
So too are the political processes by which a society
agrees how it is to be paid for. These are all things which we can
point at when we talk of ‘education’. Each entity exists by virtue
of custom and practice which has emerged over history. Each is
subject to declarations made by governments, community leaders
or institution heads at some point in time: x is a classroom,
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4.4 Technological Attenuation and “Form A2042”
y is a textbook, z is a Learning Management System, and so
on. Different declarations are possible. The education system,
as comprised by declarations of this sort, of this sort could be
radically different from what we have; all that is required are
a different set of declarations. Yet we struggle to imagine an
alternative world - even when equipped with new tools which
could conceivably bring about better alternatives.
In producing new options for acting, computer technology provides
the means for overcoming existing constraints. Ironically,
in doing so it increases uncertainty within institutions. Institutions
are often uncomfortable with increasing uncertainty, and so
their natural response is to use the technology to reinforce their
existing structures rather than using the technology to overcome
them. Computer technology can also reduce the multiplicity of
description: from the richness of the multiple descriptions of the
face-to-face relations in the Post Office, technology produces the
pale ‘monovalent’ description of the online ‘form’ through which
to apply for a new passport.
4.4 Technological Attenuation and
“Form A2042”
In the technocratic institutions of today, commands like “Fill
in Form A2042 ” are part of professional life. Today we would
expect to find Form A2024 online. It is likely to have dropdown
boxes with options which we may struggle to find the
appropriate option to express what we want. In the knowledge
of the institutional importance of such forms, we may well steer
the conversations and actions of students and colleagues in such
a way that “Form A2042 ” is easier to fill in. The complexity of
such forms has evolved into methods of assessment for learners
(multiple choice quizzes) or the collection of ‘competency’ data
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in health or education as we saw in Chapter 1.
The form was developed in the dawn of the modern age during
the first world war. Form A2042 was the name given to the
‘Field Service Post Card’, upon which soldiers could send brief
messages home by crossing-out the options which did not apply.
Paul Fussell claims it was
‘the progenitor of of all modern forms on which you
fill in things or cross out things or check off things,
from police traffic summonses to "questionnaires"
and income-tax blanks.’ (Fussell 2013)
The Field Service Post-Card is a prime example of the way in
which a technology attenuates description. Fussell notes that it
contains no space to say ‘my leg has been blown off’ or ‘I have
been admitted to hospital and am not expected to recover’.
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4.5 The Institutional effects of Uncertainty
Yet the Field Service Post Card did help with the organisational
effort of managing information, keeping relatives informed
(or misinformed) at home. It’s restricted structure prevented
soldiers relaying too much of the horror they were confronting.
How different would our history be if the soldiers in the trenches
has smartphones and social media?
The form has become the principal mode of interaction with
technology, from filling in ‘user registration details’ to online
services, student evaluation questionnaires, to social research,
the mode of attenuating description to a few simple choices for
the conveniences of monitoring, measuring and organising has
become a hallmark of modern technocracy. But is this form of
organisation effective?
4.5 The Institutional effects of
Uncertainty
The loss of rich description introduced by the form is combined
in modern institutions with an allergic response to the uncertainty
that increased options for communicating brings. This
leads to the principal pathology of modern institutions: technocracy.
The cybernetic question in this is why do the educational technologies
we have today reinforce the existing structures of the
ancient institution? When technology affords so many ways of
reorganising education, why does the VLE reproduce the structures
of the classroom, timetable, curriculum and assessment?
Why does the MOOC amplify classrooms to a global scale? Why
use video simply to film lectures and not to transform the way
teachers convey their understanding? Why use text-based online
forums as a substitute for classroom discussion when technology
affords much richer ways of engaging people in activities
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together? Why use technology to ‘root out’ plagiarism in assignments
when the conditions which create the temptation to
plagiarise and engage in education thoughtlessly could be transformed
by technology? Why use Artificial Intelligence to automate
the teacher’s ability to make judgements about the quality
of an essay?
That institutions find uses for technology to support the things
they are already doing is, of course, a reasonable response to
these questions. But the effect of shaping technological interventions
in this way is to attenuate the uncertainties produced
by the multiple options presented by technology. Existing structures
and practices are the constraint through which new possibilities
are perceived. However, this is not the end of the
story. Beyond traditional institutions, community movements,
startups and individuals free from those traditional constraints
will explore a more complete gamut of new possibilities for reorganising
things with technology. Innovative business models
like Uber or AirBnB do not arise within the confines of institutions.
But once they acquire a sufficient hold in the environment,
traditional institutions have to adapt and respond. Most
of the technological innovations which have become part of the
everyday institutional environment can trace their origins to the
counter-culture.
4.6 Management Cybernetics and
Control
This chapter introduces Management Cybernetics, developed by
Stafford Beer, as an approach to conceive of the challenge of organising
education in an age of technology. Before approaching
this, we have to understand a little more about what organisation
in education actually means. More importantly, we need to
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4.6 Management Cybernetics and Control
understand that the existing structures and practices in education
were once solutions to the human organisational problems
of learning, inquiry and science within society. Since our society
has been transformed by technology, we need to re-examine
the ways in which the human coordination of human beings and
their learning might be approached differently. In order to do
this, we have to deal with a word which is often misunderstood:
control.
Often when people use the word ‘control’, it refers to a situation
which is often not under control. The autocrat who won’t
listen to those they direct, the teacher who insists on their students
sitting in silence for the lesson, or the institutional manager
who instils fear with occasional sackings of staff. Equally,
the schoolteacher who can’t keep control of their class reveals
something of the meaning of the word ‘control’ and the problems
with its autocratic associations. such a teacher presides
over chaos where the children challenge his or her authority and
he or she has no effective response to their challenge. From a
cybernetic perspective, the teacher is overwhelmed by the collective
variety of the students: this situation breaches Ashby’s
Law. The answer sometimes seen to be the amplification of the
teacher’s attenuating power on the excessive variety of the students:
the children need discipline. Threats of sanctions to force
students to obey the “rules of the class” (which attenuate their
variety) may work. Sometimes, however, it won’t.
There are other ways of balancing the variety management
equation. Smarter teachers might observe the complexity and
the constraints that face them. They might detect that the
out-of-control situation exists precisely because of efforts to attenuate
variety. They might see that part of the problem is the
constraint which the teacher is subject to, and that they should
free themselves from that in the first instance. In essence, this
cybernetic approach is equivalent to the critical pedagogic ap-
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proaches of Paulo Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ (Freire
1996) by addressing the constraints of the situation, those constraints
can be overcome and greater space can be created for
more effective self-organisation.
Control is about relationships. The situation which is under
control is the situation which is characterised by productive
conversations. So often, attempts to establish control through
increased attenuation of individual variety result in less control,
and create the conditions for greater chaos. The response to
increased chaos can make things even worse - a positive feedback
loop. On recognising this, we can appreciate the ways in
which the attenuation of description often produced by technology,
together with the allergic response to uncertainty takes
eduction to a place where the variety of learners and the variety
of institutions is profoundly out of balance.
4.7 The Transformation of the
Institution by Technology
Educational Technology matters because history tells us that
technology is a threat to the institution. The relationship between
technology and institutions is dialectical: there are different
moments in the development of the relationship between
technology and institutions. For example, the first reaction of
the church to the printing press was to exploit it to serve its
existing structures. Guttenberg’s first print-runs were for indulgences.
The second moment emerged as it became clear that
the new freedoms to communicate and organise could potentially
threaten the status quo. Luther’s German bible didn’t
appear until 1522, but it must have been obvious that such a
thing was possible, and moreover that if individuals could read
the bible for themselves in their own language, the role of the
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4.8 The Cybernetic Approach to Institutions
church as the gateway to divine mercy might be challenged by
a "do it yourself" attitude.
The internet is much more recent to us now than Guttenberg’s
press was to Martin Luther. If we run on the same timescale,
then our Universities are at the stage of "printing indulgences"
with the technology. Perhaps more importantly, the Catholic
church in 1470 must have thought it had got to grips with printing,
that it could harness it in reinforcing its existing structures
and political power. I think this may be where we are in our
Universities’ attitude to technology right now. In a recent call
for ’co-design projects’, JISC has asked for advice on new developments
in AI, Internet of things or Learning Analytics but
all with the focus of serving the institution as it currently is
constituted.
There is little consideration that the nature of the institution,
its structures, its focus of activity, its funding, its science, its
certification, or its scientific communication might all change.
Yet we know that this has happened before. At the moment we
are seeing dramatic and rapid technical developments alongside
new business models coupled with innovative technology.
4.8 The Cybernetic Approach to
Institutions
The ways human beings manage the complexity of their work,
articulate the distinctions that they make and adapt to changing
conditions is the concern of Management Cybernetics. Institutions
pre-exist each human being. We are born into families,
grow up within economies and nations, go to schools and universities,
have bank accounts engage with or reject religions,
clubs, football teams, art galleries, social networks and supermarkets.
This fact does not help define what an institution is.
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But it does make it clear that there is something in the collective
practice of human beings which represents a powerful shaping
influence on each individual from birth, and which is reproduced
and transformed by the participation of each individual in those
institutions.
As Bourdieu pointed out (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990), the
institution of education is particularly adept in shaping the participation
of individuals with its social structures, and selecting
those reproductions and transformations to itself which maintain
its class divisions.
Institutions comprise individuals who make distinctions about
the practices they engage in, the resources they use and the
rights, duties and obligations they acknowledge. Different individuals
make different distinctions, and the dynamics of the
institution arise from differences of understanding, differences
of description and varieties in the ways distinctions are drawn.
Institutions are structured - with departments, heads of department,
vice-chancellors, estates and accounts - so as to negotiate
these differences through agreed practices and operations which
are designed to maintain cohesion in the institution’s operation.
Above all, institutions have to be adaptable. The distinctions
made by individuals reflect not only the internal operations of
the institution, but the changing state of the world. Social, political,
technological and economic change entails challenges to
existing distinctions, so the job of maintaining internal cohesion
is ongoing as the institution continually adapts to its environment.
The extent to which a university, a hospital or a state is
able to survive as a cohesive whole over time is an indication of
its viability, where ‘Viability’ means being “able to maintain a
separate existence” (Beer 1972)(Beer, 1979, p113).
Maintaining cohesion among different descriptions of the institution
is, in the end, a conversation. The question is how
that conversation should be coordinated. Institutions tend to
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4.8 The Cybernetic Approach to Institutions
have established rituals for holding conversations at different
levels. Committee structures are designed to capture events onthe-ground
and feed this into meetings of senior managers where
deliberation on the most effective methods for steering the institution
takes place. These structures tend to be hierarchical
and follow the pattern dictated by the institution’s ‘organisation
chart’.
It is obvious that all the complexity and diversity of description
on-the-ground cannot be absorbed by the few people at
the top who make decisions. Committee structures tend to be
attenuative for this reason. Data and opinion is canvased from
the bottom, and the ‘key themes’ are distilled into reports which
are fed to higher level committees which might make recommendations
which further distil the messages and feed them to the
top. It is not uncommon for this to be like a game of ‘Chinese
whispers’!
Equally, it is not uncommon for the individual at the top to
decide that they understand the nature of the problem and set
out strategies which are fed to the bottom to coordinate activity.
The power dynamics of such processes can introduce ’reigns of
terror’: dictating policy in this way stifles conversation, leading
to institutional pathology.
The organisation chart has attenuation of description built-in:
no institution could remain viable if it relied on formal channels
of communication up and down the institutional hierarchy. A
more rational approach is to view the complexity of the organisation
in terms of the complexity that individuals have to manage,
and how that complexity is absorbed. This is the challenge of
Management Cybernetics and its associated fields of Operational
Research.
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4.9 Technology and Complexity
Increasing the options for acting increases the variety of something.
By the Law of Requisite Variety introduced in Chapter
2, this means that in order to be able to control something with
its variety increased, something else must have equal or greater
variety. If the controller’s variety cannot be increased, then all
it needs to find ways of controlling the entity with more variety
by attenuating its variety.
Every living organism has to negotiate greater complexity
than it itself possesses. The environment of an individual is
vastly more complex than any individual. It includes millions
of other individuals, to start with. But it also includes physical
forces, laws, the weather, abundance or scarcity of food,
and so on. In order to be able to maintain a viable relationship
with the environment, it is necessary to attenuate its complexity,
and make the most of - indeed, to amplify - our options
for acting. Marshall McLuhan (Mcluhan and Lapham 1994)
spoke of the ways in which human extend their bodies: for example,
the clothes extend the skin, the wheel extends the legs,
the telephone extends the voice. Considering that our environment
also includes other people, and we are the environment
of those other people, issues of social organisation, politics and
freedom all come to the fore. Who attenuates who? How should
resources be distributed? How should actions be coordinated so
that wars do not arise?
There appears to be a need for a meta-level of coordination.
The organism’s engagement with its environment - it’s processes
of amplification of its complexity, and the attenuation of the environment
require a higher level overview, without which the
management of complexity cannot be balanced. So the metacoordination
is a coordination of the coordinations of the organism.
In order to coordinate the organism’s relationship with
its environment, the meta-coordination has to be able to bal-
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4.10 Beer’s Viable System Model
ance the organism’s complexity. That means that the metacoordinator
must attenuate the complexity of the organism, and
in turn amplify its own operations.
Education provides a simple example of this. Teachers have
to attenuate the behaviour of learners. Education (still) sits
learners in rows, it places the teacher at the front of the class, it
establishes rules and norms of behaviour, rights, duties and obligations
whereby the teacher is positioned with the students. In
order to balance the variety management equation, the teacher’s
variety has to balance the class’s variety. But the environment
is such that the simple management of the environment cannot
simply be coordinated by each teacher individually. The
meta-coordination has to take into account the multiple coordinations
of teachers and their relations with each other and their
environment.
At the most basic level, there are two distinctions here. That
between environment and organism, and that between metamanagement
and organism. At the root of these distinctions
is the idea that in order for two systems to be in a controlling
relationship - in order, for example, for two systems to dance
with each other, the complexity has to be managed. They have
arisen as a result of the logic which flows from the need to balance
complexity.
4.10 Beer’s Viable System Model
An institution is a collection of interconnected functional components
existing within an environment. The identity of each component
is a distinction made by those working within that component
and those working outside making observations about
its behaviour: people say, “that’s the accounts department” as
they point to others counting money and staring at spreadsheets.
The functional component only exists by virtue of these kinds
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of distinctions made about it, but the fact that the distinction
is made creates the conditions within which such a component
may exhibit coherence in its internal operations.
The components of the university must work with each other:
each makes distinctions about others, each is reliant on the other
to maintain the environment of every other component. For
example, teachers will make distinctions about learning support
services or the library, where the library will make distinctions
about accounts. Universities are ecologies of components which
maintain cohesion in their distinctions about one another.
A useful metaphor for such an ecology is the human body.
The organs of the body are much like the cohesive components
of the institution. The functional differentiation between heart
and brain, liver and kidneys are human distinctions made by
anatomists. Yet, the heart functions within an environment
which produced through the functioning of other components.
The death of a human body often results from the collapse of
one component, which leads to a general system failure collapse
of all the others.
Beer used the metaphor of the human body to conceive of the
way in which the relations between different components might
be better coordinated (Beer 1972). By ‘better’, his analysis
focused on the attenuative processes of management, with the
consequent loss of richness of description in hierarchical structures
as managers in the organisation overlook the richness of
descriptions on the ground. The pathology of this process of
attenuation threatens businesses, institutions, society and the
planet.
The Viable System Model presents a way of coordinating conversations
within the institution. As such, it is closely related to
a number of other ‘systems’ approaches for institutional development,
including Soft Systems Theory (Checkland and Scholes
1999), Activity theory(Engeström 2014), learning organisation
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4.10 Beer’s Viable System Model
theory (Senge 2006), sensitivity modelling(Vester 1998), and numerous
others. Where the VSM is distinguished from these is
its explicit adoption of Ashby’s Law, and the underpinning principle
that a viable system must have requisite variety: in other
words, it must be able to manage its complexity.
The VSM articulates a way of thinking about the different
functions of the enterprise emphasizing regulatory balance between
them: one must shape the interfaces between different
functional systems in order to translate market and technological
opportunities into one another, whilst continually coordinating
reflection on the organization’s operations and the coordinations
with external communication systems.
At this reflexive level “agency” of viable actors must be distinguished
at multiple levels: the communicative agency of individual
employees; the collective agency of departments; the overall
agency of the business with its markets. Beer’s VSM provides
an analytical scheme for characterizing these agencies.
In the VSM, five ‘regulating mechanisms’ are specified whose
job is to maintain the viability of the whole entity. His characterization
of viability draws on Ashby’s (1956) Law of Requisite
Variety. Following Ashby, Beer explains that “the regulator has
to be capable of generating a variety equivalent to the variety
that has to be regulated – or the regulator will fail” (Beer, 1979,
p 89). Thus, if the variety of the environment overwhelms the
system, then the system is said to be at risk of collapse through
unmanageable oscillation (competing for resources) amongst the
system’s components. The management situation can be expressed
by saying that the variety of the environment in which
a viable system survives ( ) is larger than the variety of the
system itself ( ). As a result, the viable system must attenuate
the variety of the environment and amplify its own operations
in order to ensure viable operation.
This relatively simple formulation invites further elaboration,
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since the mechanisms of amplification and attenuation are operations
conducted by the viable system within its environment,
and this raises the question as to how these operations are managed
( ). In this way, a more elaborated situation is shown in
Figure 1.
Figure 1 shows an operational unit which engages with the
environment, and which is coordinated by a management unit.
In this situation, the variety of the environment, , is managed
by the combination of the operation of and , where > , and
therefore must attenuate and amplify the variety of in order to
ensure that the combined result of the variety of the entity as
a whole is able to absorb the variety of the environment. Beer
(1979, at p. 96) calls this set-up the ‘Elemental organisational
unit.’
4.11 Recursive Structure and
Maintaining the Variety of
Description
The value of the metaphor of the human body is that they are
not hierarchically organised: the brain is not the “boss”, where
the heart or lungs are subordinate. Functionally-differentiated
components must work together, each receiving descriptions from
each other and each adapting to the environment of the other.
Beer’s insight was to realise that this co-dependence was much
like the dynamics of the units of Ashby’s Homeostat. The real
question was, How was the complexity of whole system managed
by the relations of these different components?
This could not simply be a process of one attenuating the variety
of descriptions produced by the other. But it might be a
matter of an increase in the number of descriptions produced
by one system leading to structural changes in the relationships
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4.12 Recursive Structuring
between other components. For example, if the heart starts to
produce increased variety in its behaviour then other components
will recognise this and adapt to it - the lungs will seek
increased oxygen, the brain may trigger the release of hormones
and so forth. The point is that additional descriptions of behaviour
are not suppressed to fit the existing model of the world
defined by the existing structure of the other organs. Additional
descriptions are treated as a signal for reorganisation so that the
extra complexity can be absorbed.
Beer’s basic idea is that institutions tend not to do this. Extra
variety in the form of new descriptions - for example, messages
from the shop floor that the staff are unhappy - tend to be
suppressed by management because they believe that the shop
floor has to be made to comply with management’s model of the
world. How can the adaptive behaviour of the human body be
imagined to exist within a business organisation? Beer argues
that the secret lies in recursive organisation.
4.12 Recursive Structuring
A recursive organisational structure is one where systems exist
within systems. This is not simply to say that an academic department
exists within a faculty (which is the hierarchical view),
but rather that the pattern and process of organisation of one
unit forms part of a larger pattern and process of organisation
in a larger one: a change to the pattern of one is a change to
the pattern of the other.
The way Beer characterises the patterning of the behaviour of
a component is through a series of transductions. A transduction
is a process of turning one set of descriptions about something
into another. This is a process of attenuation and one might
reasonably question what happens to those descriptions which
are removed by the transducer. In response, what must occur
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after the transduction is a process whereby the effectiveness of
a particular transduction must be tested to see if it successful.
The testing process is itself also a series of transductions. So, for
example, the transduction of the environment attenuates the descriptions
of the environment. The different descriptions of the
environment organise themselves against one another. Their
relationships and information about their related operations is
converted to signals about the organisation of the components.
In the light of this reduction, there are signals which are sent to
keep these signals under control. The effectiveness of this coordination
is then measured by effectively asking "is the system
doing what it is supposed to be doing?"
Beer overcomes the problem of attenuation of description by
balancing a dynamic process of attenuating and amplifying descriptions
and continually checking the descriptions which the
system selects, and changing them if necessary.
The balancing act of the viable system occurs within an environment
which is constantly changing. The checking process
of the system which is attenuating the description of the relationship
between the different components has also to consider
whether the current set of description fit the ways in which the
world is changing. The attenuation of descriptions of the future
have to be balanced with the attenuation of descriptions of the
present, and the output of this balance must be tested against
what is happening on the ground.
The balance between the attenuation of description of the future
and the descriptions of the present presents its own pattern
which has to be coordinated. At some From an empirical perspective,
the measurement of pattern is the measurement of the
redundancy of the system.
The management unit itself is directly exposed to part of the
environment as well as the operational unit (managers live in the
world too! ..although the environment of management is differ-
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4.12 Recursive Structuring
ent from that of a system’s operations). The management unit
needs some way of dealing with the variety of the environment
and with coordinating the management functions which are responsible
for absorbing the variety of V s and V m and therefore V s
must attenuate and amplify the variety of V m in order to ensure
that the combined result of the variety of the entity as a whole
is able to absorb the variety of the environment.
Consequently more detail is added to the regulatory layers
of the viable system: in this instance, a sub-unit of the management
unit which absorbs variety from the environment, and
which also absorbs variety of management functions by maintaining
a model of the whole system and anticipating changes
(Beer called this ‘System 4’) and which is used to steer more
immediate management functions. Through this process of decomposition
of regulatory functions, Beer gradually arrives at
a formulation for the viable system model with five regulating
mechanisms. This is shown in Figure 2 below:
Each mechanism, indicated as System 1 to 5 (labeled A to
F in Figure 2)—is functionally differentiated and operationally
closed, while working in an environment of the other regulating
systems. System 1 (A in the diagram) refers to the selforganising
mechanisms between the viable sub-systems whose
collective operation serves to produce the viable system and
whose effective coordination is the essential objective of all the
regulating mechanisms. The first mechanism of coordination,
shown at B, is System 2 which provides anti-oscillation of the
System 1 components through ensuring that effective damping
procedures continually evolve that “tune the engine” of System
1 in accordance with agreements between Systems 3 and 1. System
3 (shown at C) has a ‘synoptic view’ of System 1 components,
identifying synergies and configuring System 1’s resource
bargains in order to improve the outcome for the whole. The
effectiveness of this control is measured by System 3* (D) which
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4 Viability
is responsible for auditing the control situation and effectively
asking “is this doing what it should be?”
The homeostatic loop formed between Systems 1, 2, 3 and 3*
would work fine in maintaining viability in a world (represented
by the ‘environment’ depicted on the left side in Figure 2) which
did not change. But the world changes, and organisms (including
businesses) adapt by imagining how the world might change
and how they might change themselves in order to survive in it.
This is the job of System 4 which is shown in Figure 2 at E.
System 4 serves to interact with the regulating mechanisms at
Systems 1 to 3 by suggesting new possibilities for development.
It is System 4 which is the part of the management unit which is
directly connected to the environment and projects likely threats
and opportunities. As such, System 4 is an anticipatory system.
It contains a model itself and its relation to the viable system
that contains it, using this to examine hypothetical adaptation
scenarios. It projects likely environmental changes which may
threaten sustainable operation unless organizational changes are
implemented by Systems 1 to 3. Beer characterizes System 4 as
having an “Outside and then” priority which he contrasts with
the “Inside and now” priority of Systems 3 to 1 (1979, p225).
There is, Beer argues, inevitably conflict between the inside-andnow
operational management and the outside-and-then future
projections, typified by the reaction of System three which may
say “System Four constitutes the group of people who spend the
money we make in System Three” (1979, p255). This conflict
between System 4 and System 3 is called the ‘3-4 homeostat’ in
Beer’s model.
The 3-4 homeostat has to be managed: a viable system has to
identify and manage the necessary balance between System 4 activities
and System 3 activities. In the VSM this job is given to
System 5 (shown at F), which Beer associates with the ‘identity’
of the System – the maintenance of the particular balancing of
22

4.12 Recursive Structuring
regulatory mechanisms which maintains viability within its environment
(and consequently gives the viable system its particular
characteristics). However, as the environment changes, so
does the structuring of priorities: new organisational priorities
emerge, and System 5 has to steer the regulation of the system
so as to balance current operating requirements with necessary
adaptations whilst maintaining viability of the whole. Amongst
the interconnections between different regulating systems, Beer
highlights the importance of the ‘meta-systemic intervention’
channels which connect Systems 5 to 1 down the vertical axis.
This channel is a one-way instructional channel whereby the senior
management can command the operation of the System 1
components. However, Beer points out that
“the Senior Management ... is IN PRINCIPLE unable
to entertain the variety generated by any one
(never mind all) of its subsidiary viable systems that
constitute System One” (Beer, 1985, p37). (Beer
1995)
In order to provide requisite variety, horizontal channels are required
which absorb the variety of the System 1 components
through self-organisation, anti-oscillation, and audit. The ‘antioscillation
channels’ which runs through System 2 between Systems
3 and 1, and the ‘operational monitoring channels’ which
run between System 1 and System 3 via System 3* (Beer, 1979)
provide a horizontal homeostatic loop. However, because the
model is recursive, in order to maintain requisite variety, Beer
states that “System 3 must have the capability to absorb the
variety of System 1” (1979, p209). Without direct engagement
between System 3 and the operations in System 1 this cannot
be achieved. Because of this, there is a need for System 3 to
manage a two-way vertical “resource bargain” with the System
1 components which states:
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4 Viability
“out of all the activities that System One elements
might undertake, THESE will be tacked (and not
those) and the resources negotiated to these ends
will be provided.” (Beer, 1985, pp.38-39)
With this arrangement of horizontal and vertical channels, requisite
variety can be achieved whilst providing a degree of autonomy
for System 1 components coordinated by System 3 which
demands only low-variety metasystemic intervention from System
5. Each System 1 component is itself a viable system with
the same structure. The metasystemic intervention channel directly
connects the System 5s at different levels of recursion in
the system. Whilst the recursive metaphor helps to map onto
real systems, it also means that identifying the System 1 components
of a viable system presents a challenge. To qualify as a
subsidiary viable system, that system must (with other systems)
be a
“producer of the organization, and not just an adjunct
to it” (Beer, 1985, p8).
This means that each of the typical classifications of departments
in a business – accounts, sales, the board – cannot be a
viable system because it is impossible to
“hive-off a function to an independent existence, because
it cannot carry its substantive content with it.”
(Beer, 1979, p515).
At higher levels of recursion, businesses are made up from factories
and other production units, each of which may carry its
substantive content with it, and which may be spread across the
globe. Beyond the viability of businesses themselves sits larger
scale mechanisms of the viability of markets and economies, together
with socio-political structures.
24

4.13 Data and the Practical Intelligence of the Viable System Model
4.13 Data and the Practical
Intelligence of the Viable System
Model
The VSM is usually used as a tool for coordinating discussion
within institutions. However, the key to the model is the understanding
of the way that it accounts for changing patterns in
institutional life and the ways that management might respond
to them.
In recent years, the patterns of institutional life have involved
the pursuance of a strategy to engage with the ‘market’. What
are the effects of this on the descriptions produced by the system’s
components?
Typically, management have pursued various strategies of institutional
restructuring to maintain financial viability, and borne
the pain of redundancies, closing academic departments, replacing
existing faculty with adjunct professors, and so forth. Technologies
have played an important role in this process in changing
working practices, and so on.
4.14 Educational Technology and the
Viable System Model
Like Pask’s conversation theory, Beer’s Viable System Model
found application in thinking about educational technology. In
the work of Britain and Liber (Britain 1999), the Virtual Learning
Environment (Learning Management System) was seen through
the lens of the Viable System Model. Essentially, the argument
was that technology changed the ways in which education could
be organised. It transformed the amplification of the teacher,
but enabling them to manage the complexity of learners in new
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4 Viability
ways. The VLE facilitated the distribution of tools and resources
for learning across the internet, so that co-location of learners
was not necessary organisational requirement for education to
be effectively coordinated. Conversation, in particular, it was
argued, could be coordinated online, and need not be restricted
to the classroom.
However, there were limitations in the technology. Most VLE
systems performed the distribution of resources adequately -
VLEs became repositories of resources which could be allocated
according to groups of students which could be organised by the
institution. At worse, the caricature of the VLE was that it was
a ‘giant photocopier’. With most of the available systems, students
could not organise each other, set up private discussion
groups, or install their own tools. The tools which they (and
their teachers) could use were the tools provided within the VLE
technological infrastructure. Whilst plug-in architectures were
provided to allow tool extensions to the basic toolkit, these had
to be administered centrally, and every new tool made available
through the VLE increased the headache of the computer
service department responsible for maintaining the technology.
In effect, this meant that a basic toolset was provided which
tended to reproduce the practices of the institution. There were
classrooms, and there were discussion forums. But not a lot else.
There were a number of experiments which sought to overcome
these difficulties. Among the most radical was a peerto-peer
Virtual Learning Environment created by Liber, which
could be controlled by learners, and afforded self-organisation,
as well as the theoretical use of a much richer range of tools
which were under the control of the learner.
26

4.15 Viable Learners and Personal Learning Environments
4.15 Viable Learners and Personal
Learning Environments
The distinctions made by the educational institution between
its functional components reflect distinctions made by individuals
in their personal existence. Learners too must have requisite
variety. One of the effects of education is to equip learners with
greater adaptive flexibility as they seek to empower themselves
with new ways of organising themselves within a fast-changing
environment. In an increasingly technological environment, individuals
must make distinctions about the tools they use, the
social software they engage with, the utterances they make, the
ways they do this.
Which distinctions are made? How are they coordinated?
4.16 Transduction across distinction
boundaries
Beer’s description of the VSM is a powerful abstraction. In practice,
his work with organisations of all kinds involved introducing
the distinction between Systems 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, and asking participants
to recast their understanding of their organisation in
this context.
Beer presents his distinctions between the different regulating
levels as something which emerges from Ashby’s Law, but
in order to investigate this further, we have to turn back to
Ashby’s concept of ‘variety’. Variety is defined by Ashby as
the maximum number of states that a system can exist in. A
state, in terms of Ashby’s homeostat is fairly easy to see: it is
a discrete number on the dial of the machine. But a state of a
human being is much harder to identify. For example, I might
describe human states in terms of the activities that humans do:
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4 Viability
sleeping, waking, eating, walking. Beer’s empirical approach is
to explore the states of individuals in organisations by counting
the discrete operations which they have to perform. But
even these discrete operations are not easy to count. It’s a very
broad-brush approach.
In fact, the state of Ashby’s homeostat is effectively a description
of the number it displays, where there are a discrete number
of possible descriptions of the value of the device.
In other words, a state is a description, and a description has
to be communicated in order to be recognised as a description.
As I suggested in Chapter 2, multiple descriptions relate to
many of the practices of educational technologists. In intersubjective
communication, there are many descriptions. Artistic
creations too produce many descriptions, whether they are
Tracy Emin’s bed, or a Rembrandt self-portrait. More importantly,
technological change produces greater variety of description,
because the means by which a description might be made
are expanded. A communication technology makes new possibilities
available for the making of descriptions about something.
Course material may be communicated via text, video, skype,
face-to-face, in a book, in a podcast, and so on. Each method
varies in the way that variety is managed. Each way of describing
something can be counted.
Seeing ‘variety’ as the number of possible descriptions which
might be made about the same thing also introduces a connection
between the concept of redundancy and coordination. It
also allows the fundamental problem of the shifting situation in
organisations to be addressed.
So if variety is connected to the number of descriptions of
the same thing, what happens at the transduction boundary
between one regulating level and another in an organisation?
Multiple descriptions of the same thing are attenuated into
a concept which summarises them all, whilst the new summary
28

4.17 The Pathologies of Organisation
description generates multiple new descriptions. The boundary
is produced between the attenuation of many descriptions, and
the proliferation of descriptions on the other side of the boundary.
The basic transduction can look like this:
Environment
Individual
With this model of transduction and boundaries, we can return
to thinking about the VSM. The difference between System
1 and its environment, or between System 2 and System 3 is a
difference in the kind of description. System 2 makes descriptions
of System 1, System 3 makes descriptions of System 2 and
System 1, and so on. Without differences in the description
which these different components make, there is no grounds for
making a distinction between the different systems. In Beer’s
own practice with businesses, the process involved identifying
and distinguishing the different descriptions which related to
the different regulating systems. Each description was subtly
different, but the differences between descriptions were effectively
squeazed into the framework of the VSM.
4.17 The Pathologies of Organisation
One of the most powerful features of the Viable System Model
is the way it characterises the pathologies of organisation. Organisations
become pathological when they cease to effectively
identify the components of their viable operation. However, this
does not mean that organisations which do not identify their
components cannot exist or even survive. But it does mean that
they depend on larger systems to survive. They are, in effect,
parasitic.
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4 Viability
The most common pathology is the squashing together of the
different regulating levels. When System 5 believes that System
4 isn’t necessary, or that System 3’s function can be executed
by System 5, and System 5 attempts to amalgamate all the
descriptions together, then organisations become rigid. Such
pathologies usually arise from the desire to seek efficiencies, and
the stripping out of redundancies of operation. What are the
systemic consequences of this?
From our description about the transduction boundaries so
far, this introduces the problem that the variety of description
is lost in the organisation. With a loss of overall variety of
description, the organisation becomes more brittle.
This can be represented diagrammatically. Imagine that three
levels of descriptions are produced which relate to the activities
of System 5, 4 and 3. This means that the descriptions of the
synergies of organisation of the components present themselves
to System 4 as ‘the current working practice’, whilst - partly in
response to this - System 4 generates alternative descriptions of
the world which are not recognised by System 3. System 5, by
contrast, produces is fed descriptions of the difference between
System 4 and 3, and itself generates descriptions of organisational
identity which fed back to the system components.
The Viable System Model maintains an ecology of different
perspectives on the same thing.
4.18 Bateson on Flexibility and
Rigidity in Education
At the end of Gregory Bateson’s book, Mind and Nature, there
is an essay called "Time is Out of Joint", in which he talks
about the relationship between knowledge, science and educational
management. It was written as a memorandum to the
30

4.18 Bateson on Flexibility and Rigidity in Education
Regents of the University of California in 1978. He says:
"While much that universities teach today is new
and up-to-date, the presupposition or premises of
thought upon which all our teaching is based are ancient
and, I assert, obsolete. I refer to such notions
as:
1. The Cartesian dualism separating "mind" and
"matter"
2. The strange physicalism of the metaphors which
we use to describe and explain mental phenomena
- "power", "tension", "energy", "social forces",
etc
3. Our anti-aesthetic assumption, borrowed from
the emphasis which Bacon, Locke and Newton
long ago gave to the physical sciences, viz that
all phenomena (including the mental) can and
shall be studied and evaluated in quantitative
terms.
The view of the world - the latent and partly unconscious
epistemology - which such ideas together
generate is out of date in three different ways:
1. pragmatically, it is clear that these premises
and their corollaries lead to greed, monstrous
over-growth, war, tyranny, and pollution. In
this sense, our premises are daily demonstrated
false, and the students are half aware of this.
2. Intellectually, he premises are obsolete in that
systems theory, cybernetics, holistic medicine,
and gestalt psychology offer demonstrably better
ways of understanding the world of biology
and behaviour.
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4 Viability
3. As a base for religion, such premises as I have
mentioned became clearly intolerable and therefore
obsolete about 100 years ago. In the aftermath
of Darwinian evolution, this was stated
rather clearly by such thinkers as Samuel Butler
and Prince Kropotkin. But already in the eighteenth
century, William Blake saw that the philosophy
of Locke and Newton could only generate
"dark Satanic mills"
Bateson’s work fundamentally had been about justifying these
claims in an ecological science which rested on cybernetics (it’s
interesting that he doesn’t make the distinction with systems
theory). I’d always felt that Bateson appeared to lack a political
edge in his writing, preferring to argue the case for his
"explanatory principles" rather than fighting to get things to
change. However, the following passage contains some powerful
political rhetoric, although unfortunately, his prediction that the
"facts of deep obsolescence will command attention" has not yet
come to pass:
"So, in this world of 1978, we try to run a university
and to maintain standards of "excellence" in the
face of growing distrust, vulgarity, insanity, exploitation
of resources, victimization of persons, and quick
commercialism. The screaming voices of greed, frustration,
fear and hate. It is understandable that
the Board of Regents concentrates attention upon
matters which can be handled at a superficial level,
avoiding the swamps of all sorts of extremism. But
I still think that the facts of deep obsolescence will,
in the end, compel attention."
What would he say about our universities today, where the
screaming voices of greed, frustration, fear and hate have taken
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4.18 Bateson on Flexibility and Rigidity in Education
over the halls of learning themselves, not just the world outside
the ivory tower. What would he make of the new managerial
class of administrator today... particularly after having so many
difficulties himself in ’fitting in’ to the academic establishment.
My guess is he would find it far worse - although perhaps he
would not be surprised. He sarcastically remarks that this is
"only 1978" and that by 1979,
"we shall know a little more by dint of rigour and
imagination, the two great contraries of mental process,
either of which by itself is lethal. Rigour alone
is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity."
Bateson’s insight here is that distinctions made by those who
dream of things being better must be tempered with the analysis
of how and why things are the way they are. The conversation
between rigour and imagination is one of the most important
things that must occur within the institution. Here, Bateson is
critical of the student protests in the sixties. The protest was
right, but the analysis was not:
"I believe that the students were right in the sixties:
There was something very wrong in their education
and indeed in almost the whole culture. But I believe
that they were wrong in their diagnosis of where the
trouble lay. They fought for "representation" and
"power". On the whole, they won their battles and
now we have student representation on the Board
of the Regents and elsewhere. But it becomes increasingly
clear that the winning of these battles for
"power" has made no difference in the educational
process. The obsolescence to which I referred is unchanged
and, no doubt, in a few years we shall see
the same battles, fought over the same phony issues,
all over again."
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4 Viability
Bateson articulates a theory about education’s relation to science
and to politics. He introduces this theory by saying "I
must now ask you to do some thinking more technical and more
theoretical than is usually demanded of general boards in their
perception of their own place in history. I see no reason why the
regents of a great university should share in the anti-intellectual
preferences of the press of media."
His theory reflects on what he sees as "two components in
evolutionary process, and that mental process similarly has a
double structure.". He argues for a conservative inner logic that
demands compatibility and conformance; at the same time there
is an imaginative, adaptive response by nurture in order to survive
in a changing world. His point about time being “out of
joint” is that the conservative and imaginative forces are mutually
out-of-step: “Imagination has gone too far ahead of rigour
and the result looks to conservative elderly persons like me, remarkably
like insanity or perhaps like nightmare, the sister of
insanity.” He points out this this process is common in many
fields: the law lags behind technology, for example. However,
he argues for a dialectical necessity relating “conservatives” to
“liberals”, “radicals” and so on:
“behind these epithets lies epistemological truth which
will insist that the poles of contrast dividing the persons
are indeed dialectical necessities of the living
world.”
He argues that the purpose of university management is to maintain
the balance between conservative and imaginative forces:
“if the Board of Regents has any nontrivial duty it is
that of statemanship in precisely this sense - the duty
of rising above partisanship with any component or
particular fad in university politics.”
34

4.18 Bateson on Flexibility and Rigidity in Education
Bateson argues that there is a reason why “acquired characteristics”
can not be inherited in biology so as to protect the gene
system from too rapid change. In Universities, there is no such
barrier:
"Innovations become irreversibly adopted into the
on-going system without being tested for long-time
viability; and necessary changes are resisted by the
core of conservative individuals without any assurance
that these particular changes are the ones to
resist."
The problem is that universities can be become corrupt, where
the forces of conservatism take over:
"It is not so much “power” that corrupts as the myth
of “power” It was noted above that “power”, like “energy”,
“tension”, and the rest of the quasi-physical
metaphors are to be distrusted and, among them,
“power” is one of the most dangerous. He who covets
a mythical abstraction must always be insatiable!”
What would Bateson think of where we have arrived at in
education today? If his analysis is right, it is because of the
“out-of-jointedness” of the two forces. His question to the board
of Regents is simple:
"Do we, as a Board, foster whatever will promote
in students, in faculty, and around the boardroom
table those wider perspectives which will bring our
system back into an appropriate synchrony or harmony
between rigour and imagination?"
We have no information as to how the Californian Regents responded.
35

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