by Aline Normoyle
In 1948, Norbert Weiner published a book called Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. At the time, it was a best seller and the prefix cyber became eponymous with futuristic technologies. In fact, intellectuals associated with cybernetics were sought after management consultants and public intellectuals.
In fact, the 1971 Chilean government, under Salvatore Allende, even recruited a cyberneticist, Stanford Beer, to design a new, flexible, and resilient modern system of bureaucracy for Chile. The system was called Cybersym and it aimed to create a flexible administration that preserved the independence and autonomy of its citizens. These goals would be achieved through dense information networks with decision-making authority at every level in a hierarchy, not strictly top-down. Unfortunately, Cybersym never got past the design stage, as Pinochet overthrew the Chilean government in 1973, forcing Beer to flee. Beer would relocate to the UK where he remained an energetic intellectual, attempting to build a computer based on algae in a pond, studying art and poetry, holding lectures, writing, and conversing with other interesting people such as Brian Eno (!). But his career as a management consultant never recovered.
In his book, The Unaccountability machine, Dan Davies defines cybernetics as “the study and control of systems”. Unlike economics, which historically relies on simplified models of human behavior to describe system effects (e.g. from the inside out), cybernetics instead tries to understand systems by observing its behaviors holistically (e.g. from the outside in). The cybernetic approach to understanding systems treats systems as a black-box: we can only understand the black box by studying how different inputs affect the output.
POSIWID
Large organizations are complex systems that consist of multiple, interacting box boxes. As Davies describes it, the defining characteristic of these systems was feedback, or “the cyclic and recursive use of the output of one black box as the input of another, then back again”. Feedback between many black boxes is what makes the high-level behaviors of these systems so hard to analyze and understand. An organization, such as a school, can consist entirely of people who care a lot about education, but the school system produces credentials (hopefully, but not necessarily tied to learning). Davies describes these systems as “unpredictable, but not random”. Beer summarized this phenomena — the tendency of organizations to produce outputs at odds with its mission — with the phrase “The purpose of a system is what it does”, or POSIWID. Davies gives the following examples.
the purpose of academic publishing is to generate citations for academics and profits for publishing houses; the individuals involved might want to expand and communicate human knowledge, but the system behaves in ways that support its goals, not theirs. The purpose of the pet hotel at Schiphol Airport was to shred squirrels; everyone involved may have cared about animal welfare, but the system had been set up to ensure compliance with import regulation at the lowest cost possible, so that’s what it did.
Homeostasis
The only way to determine the behavior of a complex system is to understand its steady states. In other words, how do the paths of least resistance within the organization combine together to create predictable and habitual responses? Whereas economics has the concept of ‘equilibrium’ where the system ‘stops’ because everyone has achieved an optimal state, cybernetics defined the concept of homeostasis. In homeostasis, the system continues to change, but does so in a way that produces predictable patterns — like the cycles of water or seasons.
Resource Bargains
Stanford Beer believed that good management, with the right structure, could allow large organizations to interact effectively with a complex world. Through Resource bargains, layers within the organization would have areas of responsibility within which they would have complete autonomy. Davies explains as follows.
Beer was trying to adapt hierarchical systems so they were fit for their purpose in a changing world. He saw a strict command-and-control approach as dangerously inflexible, while excessive delegation would destroy the organisation’s ability to act as a coherent system.
Davies uses a military platoon as an example.
It’s a concept that might be most easily illustrated by thinking of a military platoon that’s given an objective – to capture a bridge, say. There is a higher level of the hierarchy that is responsible for coming up with objectives, fitting them into an overall battle plan and making sure that different platoons don’t get in the way of each other. But once the orders are given, capturing the bridge is the responsibility of the platoon, using the soldiers and equipment assigned to the task. The general doesn’t keep on managing the attack; the next piece of communication he or she expects is either that the bargain has been kept (the bridge is captured), or that some external factor has interfered, and the resource bargain needs to be renegotiated by the survivors.
In this setup, both managers and workers have a reciprocal responsibility to each other: manage for providing clear objectives and organizing with other units; workers for getting tasks done. Contrast this with the ubiquitous command and control management structures we see today: call centers where employees can only follow a script and have no authority to help a customer. Their job is to act as an accountability sink — a place where for information to be ignored — or as David Graeber would describe it in Bullshit Jobs, as duck tapers, people who patch broken systems with temporary fixes that keep it hobbling along.