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in conjunction with new radar technologies but was also taken to a high art
in the United States.
5
Beer was not himself involved in the wartime development of OR. On his
own account, he rather wandered into it while he was in the army, first by at-
tempting to use symbolic logic, which he had studied at University College,
to organize large numbers of men into functioning systems.
6
He first heard of
OR as a field on his return to England and plunged himself into it as he moved
into civilian life. Two early papers, published in 1953 and 1954, for example,
outline novel statistical indices for measuring the productivity of manufactur-
ing processes which he developed and implemented at the Samuel Fox steel
company. These papers have a very practical bent, including ideas on how the
sampling of productivity should be done and how the information could be
systematically and routinely collected, assembled, and presented. The aim
of the indices in question was the ability to forecast how long it would take
to perform any given operation, a topic of interest both to the managers and
customers of the mill (Beer 1953, 1954).
Beer's career in OR was very successful, as is evident from the biographi-
cal sketch above, and OR continued to play an important part throughout his
subsequent work, both as an employee and as a consultant. But at an early
stage he began to look beyond it. The second of the OR papers just mentioned
is largely devoted to the development and use of performance measures for
individual production operations in the factory, but it concludes with a sec-
tion entitled “The Future Outlook” (also the title of Grey Walter's novel in its
English publication two years later) looking forward to the development of
“models . . . which would embrace the whole complex manufacturing struc-
ture of, say, an integrated steelworks.” Beer notes that such models would
themselves be very complex to construct and use and mentions some relevant
mathematical techniques already deployed by OR practitioners, including
game theory and linear programming, before continuing, “Advances in the
increasingly discussed subject of cybernetics, allied with the complex models
mentioned, might result in a fully mechanized form of control based on the
technique described here” (1954, 57).
What did cybernetics mean, in assertions like that, for Beer, and how did
it differ from OR? This takes us straight back to questions of ontology and a
concept that I have been drawing on all along, that of an exceedingly complex
system. Here we need only return briely to its origin. In his irst topic,
Cyber-
netics and Management
(1959), Beer distinguished between three classes of
systems (while insisting that they in fact shaded into one another): “simple,”
“complex,” and “exceedingly complex” (fig. 6.3). He gave six examples of the
