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6^thMetaphorum Conference – 9-10 of March 2007

 St.Gallen - Switzerland

 

New Developments of Organizational Cybernetics

after Stafford Beer

 

The Stafford Beer heritage in the 21^st Century

 

Leonid Ototsky – SIM Chair of the MIPT (Russia)

http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it

 

Abstract

 

       1. The challenges to society at the beginning of the 21^st Century demand to revisit Norbert Wiener’s prediction of a “worldwide state in next century”. He made this prediction in his book “The Human Use of Human Beings” in the early 1950s. Current information and communication technologies can be enablers of this political development. I comment in a recent paper (http://www.ototsky.mgn.ru/it/papers/prague2006.htm) that Wiener did not provide detailed arguments for his prediction and it was left to Stafford Beer, the “father of management cybernetics” the detailed proposal for new organizational forms. Furthermore I wrote that Beer’s legacy was not only a theory of viable systems but a political vision of a state through the design of Cybersyn in Chile.

   It is reveling that at the same time of the Cybersyn project, independently of the Chilean project, another similar project was emerging in the USSR; the father of this project, the Global State Integrated System – OGAS, was the famous Russian cybernetician Victor Glushkov.  Unfortunately both projects had sad endings. Cybersyn was obliterated by Pinochet’s coup d'état. The OGAS project died quietly under the rigid bureaucratic Soviet System in spite of Glushkov’s extraordinary energy and efforts.

    2. I propose that the time has come to revive those two imaginative societal designs. Last year I wrote about the importance of the Cybersyn experience in the modern world ( http://www.ototsky.mgn.ru/it/papers/stafford21.pdf ). It will be in the best memory of Stafford if the metaphorum community debated today how to enable a “nervous system” for mankind’s viability, considering among other aspects the effective use of current ICTs.

       3.  Directions for making this possible could be:

(1) Dissemination of VSM ideas as wide as possible, including communicating the “islands of VSM lovers” through a shared ‘nervous system’.

(2) Finding forms to integrate the VSM paradigm with the activities of the  most significant ICT vendors (IBM, Oracle …).

 Using the VSM as an “upper ontology” for performance management, linking it to ERP, SOA, Semantic Web, theory of constraints, etc (http://www.ototsky.mgn.ru/it/t_times2001.htm).

 Supporting research connected to the VSM (Viable Software - http://charles-herring.com/Thesis/ViableSoftware.pdf, Autonomic Computing - http://www.zurich.ibm.com/pdf/ebizz/idd-ac.pdf  , National Innovations Systems - http://nzae.org.nz/files/%2322-DEVINE.PDF  , http://www.sim-mfti.ru/content/?fl=415&doc=1151   etc).

(5) Developing and extending the VSM itself, considering ideas such as Autopoietic Systems, biosemiotics, metasystem transition, some biological and sociological ideas which are not used in the VSM now. It is necessary to develop a VSM-II. Raul Espejo’s presentation to Metephorum-2006 about “Boundaries and Identity” may be a good example of such further development of the VSM.

 

I will give details of the above 5 directions in the presentation.