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Diagnosing the System for Organizations (1985). The VSM was at the forefront
of Beer's thinking and consulting work from the 1960s to the 1990s and at-
tracted a considerable following. A two-day workshop on the VSM held at
the Manchester Business School in January 1986 led to the production of an
edited volume describing further interpretations and applications of the VSM
by a range of academics, consultants, and people in industry and the military
(Espejo and Harnden 1989), and variants of the VSM are still practiced and
taught today.
The VSM transformed Beer's earlier vision of the cybernetic factory along
two axes. First, the simulation of the cybernetic factory discussed above,
where human management filled in for the not-yet-built U-machine, became
in effect the thing itself. Beer continued to look forward to as much com-
puterization of information gathering, transmission, and transformation as
possible (as in the T- and V-machines). But the ambition to dispense with the
human entirely was abandoned. Instead, human managers were to be posi-
tioned within purposefully designed information flows at just those points
that would have been occupied by adaptive ponds or whatever (e.g., the posi-
tion they in fact occupied in the earlier simulations).
Second, Beer extended and elaborated his conception of information flows
considerably. In Brain of the Firm , the first of the VSM trilogy, he argued thus:
The aim of the firm had, as usual, to be to survive in an environment that was
not just fluctuating but also changing—as new technologies appeared in the
field of production and consumption for example. How was this to be accom-
plished? What would a viable firm look like? The place to look for inspiration,
according to Beer, was again nature, but now nature as the source of inspira-
tion in the design of viable organizations, rather than nature as the immediate
source of adaptive materials. Beer's idea was to read biological organisms as
exemplary of the structure of viable systems in general, and to transplant the
key features of their organization to the structure of the firm. In particular,
he chose the human nervous system as his model. In the VSM, then, Beer's
strategy was to transplant the organic into the social, but not as literally as
before. The firm would no longer contain trained mice or Daphnia at its heart;
instead, information flows and processing would be laid out as a diagram of
human bodily flows and transformations.
The spirit of the VSM is strikingly expressed in the juxtaposition of two fig-
ures from Brain of the Firm . Figure 6.11A is a schematic of the body; figure 6.11B
is a schematic of the firm. Brain goes into considerable detail in rehearsing the
then-current understanding of human neurophysiology—the pathways both
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