Using the Viable System Model and Its Real-time Monitoring to Address Climate Change

 Stafford Beer’s Viable System presents a template of the different management functions of any organization that can be scaled from small to large. It is an appropriate model to address the related contextual aspects of the planetary climate.  It can coordinate  the real time – or almost real time – monitoring of essential variables that affect planetary health   Human survival should be a purpose almost everyone supports. It depends on a healthy environment: livable temperatures for humans, flora and fauna including  mitigation measures. A planetary System Five would embody these values.   System Four, focused on the future, scans emerging trends, weak signals and opportunities for implementing both improved technology and equitable human development.   System Three manages and the inside and now of the organization. It features resource bargains where trade-offs can be explored. Because resources are limited choices should focus on key variables.   System Two keeps track of conformance with agreed standards and protocols for gathering and recording information. Routine aspects monitored need to be standardized to be fully comparable.   System Three Star is an audit function that mops up the variety that isn’t already accommodated. It may be a sporadic ‘ miss anything’ check or it might investigate specific events.   The System One operations would look at different aspects of the human system’s interactions with their natural and social environments. Some of these would be efforts to provide clean water, clean energy, more natural agriculture and aquaculture and health and education services for the populations.   This template’s levels of recursion from the planetary to the community could keep track of homeostats reflecting essential variables and identify gaps or shortcomings in sustainability efforts. Much of the recommended information is   gathered but not always integrated. Such an effort could be revenue-neutral by catching trends before they became crises.     &nbsp

Walking the Line: Making ane Dissolving Distinctions with the Viable System Model and Team Syntegrity

The job of an organization, or an organism for that matter, is to manage its interactions so as to meet the challenges thrown up by the complexity of its environment. This requires that knowledge be obtained about itself and its environments now and in the foreseeable future. One of the most profound questions that must be addressed is whether the distinctions and assumptions that served well in the past will continue to do so. Beer’s Viable System Model is an effective tool to clarify distinctions and assumptions. It examines the five management functions that support productive operations, the seven vertical communications channels they use and monitor, the balance between these channels and the horizontal ones linking it to the present and future environment and the balance between its present and future emphasis. Once these distinctions have been surfaced, the Team Syntegrity process may be used to bring in additional stakeholders and information and dissolve them. Starting with a broad opening question, participants are invited to aim high and wide and introduce any factor they think might be important. If the mix of participants is diverse, new light can be shed on almost every distinction and assumption made in the context of the VSM exercise. Some may be confirmed, others abandoned and still others modified to take into account different perspectives on constraints and success criteria. These may be remapped onto a new VSM with different homeostats defined and different feedback loops designed to monitor them. Although the default profile of ‘the organization’ is a profit-making corporation, this path could be beneficial as well to governments, cooperatives and non-profits who are likely to have a broader range of stakeholders, who may include opposing parties, and multiple success criteria

Team syntegrity: A new methodology for group work

Team Syntegrity is a new process, developed by management cybernetician Stafford Beer, for enabling groups to work together in a democratic, non-hierarchical fashion to capture their best thinking. It is a particularly appropriate process to use when groups are characterized by high levels of diversity - either because they come from different countries, such as the members of the European Community or NAFTA, or because they come from different political, cultural or disciplinary perspectives. This article describes how syntegrations look in action, the considerations which apply to their planning and delivery, and some avenues for future development and experimentation.

Viable System Model of Political Parties

A VIABLE  SYSTEM MODEL OF POLITICAL PARTIES     Allenna Leonard, Ph.D. 34 Palmerston Square Toronto, Ontario M6G 2S7 Canada <allenna_leonard@yahoomcom> www.audemanriver.com     ABSTRACT       Political parties exist in western democracies as a means of reducing variety by formalizing factions and allowing for a more manageable choice for voters. I will be using the system in the United States as an example although comparisons with parliamentary systems will be noted at times.   Political parties are nested hierarchies that proceed from the national committee level down through the state and county/municipality. The rules that govern them range from the formal, such as the rules established by the Federal Election Commission to the informal and sometimes quirky such as the “we don’t want nobody that nobody sent”. Party discipline is far broader and far looser in the United States than it is in a parliamentary system.  Voters usually indicate a party preference when they register to vote although about a third of the electorate now counts itself as ‘independent’.  Depending on the state, independents may or may not be restricted to voting in the general election.  Joining a political party is as easy as checking a box.  In contrast, in parliamentary systems, a minority of voters join a party by paying a subscription fee which allows them to attend the party caucus that nominates candidates for that party.  Party discipline is much stricter in the parliamentary system where the leader and his or her advisors determine the position on a vote and an office holder who votes against the position can be expelled from the party unless the special circumstance of the free vote is in force. In the United States, all votes are free votes. Party discipline is enforced by the party whip but the means used is persuasion, augmented by arm-twisting, horse trading and the occasional threat.   The activities of the five systems of the VSM are not evenly distributed throughout the recursion levels.  For example, the party platform does appear in System Five, but aspects may be ignored or repudiated by individual candidates often without heavy consequences. Most System Four activities are concentrated on winning the next election, although shorter and longer term planning is done and issues are debated for possible inclusion in the platform or for legislative or judicial initiatives. Public relations and strategy also appear here. Systems Three and Three Star adjust resources among activities depending on election cycle calendar and other priorities with System Two coordinating whatever is applicable at the particular recursion level.  System One activities include, again depending on the election cycle calendar, voter registration, candidate training, and fund raising.  All may involve incumbent officeholders and candidates although the particular campaigns are separate organizations.   The VSM analysis will show some strengths and weaknesses of the present system and some possibilities for coordination with like-minded issue groups. &nbsp

Symbiosis as a Metaphor for Sustainability Practice in Human Affairs

This concept paper is an exploration of various symbiotic relationships and their potential relevance for the organization and conduct of human affairs. Many types of symbiosis exist: between plants, between plant and animal life and between different animals. They contribute to protection and defense, cleaning, reproduction, nutrition, transportation and illumination. Some symbiots are so tightly coupled that they are not able to exist, or exist in the same form, separately. Others can exist separately but they are less viable alone than together. Still others benefit from but do not depend upon the relationship. All seem to provide complementary features and strengths that either enhance the success and well being of both or impose a bearable burden on the non-advantaged partner. We are seeking, and none too soon, new ways to make a difference in the achievement of sustainable relationships in human society and organizations and between human activity and the natural environment. A broader and deeper appreciation of symbiosis in the general public and among researchers in different disciplines may make a contribution to both innovation and a more effective application of existing knowledge and tools

Integrating Susteinability Practices Using the Viable System Model

This paper represents an effort to ecplore the use of Stafford Beer's Viable System Model to design human communities that foster adaptation to criteria of sustainability in our natural and social environments. With the projected rise in sea level and other changes that may accompany warming temperatures, it seems probable that many communities, even some large cities, will have to be abandoned and their populations relocated. This difficult circumstance could create tens of millions of climate change refugees and be met with the failure and incompetence that characterized the response to Hurricaine Katrina or it could provide an opportunity to rebuild in a manner that combines a high quality of life with a low impact on the environment. Using the framework of the VSM, three levels of recursion will be explored: the household, the neighborhood and the city. It will be possible to draw on lessons learned about building and maintaining cities in different climates and under different conditions over the centuries and from the construction of 'new towns' in the past fifty years. It has been characteristic of communities that regularily endured environmental challenges to have fostered means of collaboration and cooperation to address them and to constrain competition within bounds that did not threaten their common survival. There is no shortage of ideas and designs that could be applied but there is not yet the political and social infrsastructure or the political will to implement them. Steps taken in this direction might help coalesce the necessary political will to begin planning or to act to attenuate its impact. The following are proposed as guidelines under the VSM. The community and the city's external relationships with the surrounding natural, social and economic environments should be such that they can support themselves while avoiding endangering their own survival or that of their surrounding environments. Their internal operations should be such that an adequate quality of life is available to everone from the most dependent members of its socity to the most productive. They should pursue these ends with a view to maintaining a balance between collaboration/symbiosis and competition with the fewest restrictions on the autonomy of members consistent with the other guidelines. The Viable System Model cam be both a teplate for design and a framework for discussion of what usutainable communities in a time of climate change might look like. Such discussions would be facilitated by group processes such as Beer's Team Syntegrity process that he invented as a companion to the VSM. The process provides a whole system, high variety structure that gives equivalent status to each participant and viewpoint. This high level of communication will help to provide the cohesiveness that is needed when sacrifices must be made and hardship shared in order to achieve a new equilibrium with the environment