Stafford Beer

Biography

Anthony Stafford Beer (25 September 1926, Fulham, London – 23 August 2002, Toronto) was a British theorist and consultant, generally described as the father of management cybernetics. He left University College London to serve in the British Army from 1944 to 1949, ending as a company commander in the Gurkhas, then joined United Steel, where from 1956 to 1961 he ran what was among the first operational research groups in British industry and operated one of the earliest business computers. He co-founded the consultancy SIGMA, worked for the International Publishing Corporation, and from 1970 practised independently, increasingly on social and governmental rather than corporate systems. He held a chair at Manchester Business School and later lived and worked between Wales and Toronto.

Key Ideas

• Management cybernetics. Beer's founding move, set out in Cybernetics and Management (1959), was to treat the firm as a system to be regulated rather than a hierarchy to be commanded, and to apply Norbert Wiener's and W. Ross Ashby's control theory to organisations directly.
• The Viable System Model (VSM). His major contribution, developed in Brain of the Firm (1972) and The Heart of Enterprise (1979). The VSM specifies five necessary functions any organisation must perform to remain viable in a changing environment: operations (System 1), coordination (2), operational control and resource bargaining (3), intelligence and future-orientation (4), and policy and identity (5). The model is recursive — each viable system contains and is contained by viable systems — which makes it applicable at any scale from a team to a state.
• Variety engineering. Applying Ashby's law of requisite variety as a practical design discipline: since a regulator must have at least as much variety as the thing it regulates, management consists of attenuating the variety coming in and amplifying the variety going out.
• POSIWID. "The purpose of a system is what it does." Beer's most quoted line, and a deliberate refusal of stated intentions as evidence: a system that reliably produces an outcome has that outcome as its purpose, whatever its mission statement says.
• Team Syntegrity. A protocol, based on the icosahedron, for structuring the deliberation of a group of thirty so that information circulates without a hierarchy — set out in Beyond Dispute (1994).

Project Cybersyn

From 1971 to 1973 Beer advised Salvador Allende's government in Chile on the cybernetic management of the nationalised economy, producing Project Cybersyn. The project is the largest attempt ever made to run a national economy on cybernetic principles in near-real time, and it was destroyed with the military coup of 11 September 1973.

Selected Works

• Cybernetics and Management (1959)
• Decision and Control (1966)
• Brain of the Firm (1972; 2nd ed. 1981)
• Designing Freedom (1974, the CBC Massey Lectures)
• The Heart of Enterprise (1979)
• Diagnosing the System for Organizations (1985)
• Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity (1994)

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Beer is the clearest historical case of someone attempting to design a human–machine system at the scale of a society, with an explicit theory of what the machine was for and an explicit politics attached. Designing Freedom in particular argues that information technology is not neutral with respect to liberty, and that badly designed institutions produce unfreedom whatever their intentions — an argument that has aged extremely well.

Related Reading

• Project Cybersyn
• Ross Ashby
• Norbert Wiener
• Cybernetics