STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 246

be compensated for by appropriate adjustments to their behavior. The model
here would be a simple servo-controlled negative feedback mechanism.
But even at this level of the body, autonomy is not complete. Figure 6.11B
shows direct connections between the control systems, 1A , 1B , and so on.
The idea here is that if something unusual is happening in subsidiary 1A, say,
which supplies parts to 1B , then 1B should know about it so that it can take
steps to allow for that. There must, that is, be some information channel link-
ing these subsidiaries, as there is between the heart and the lungs. And fur-
ther, Beer observed, in the human body there are usually several different
channels linking levels of the nervous system. Figure 6.11A thus distinguishes
two further channels—the sympathetic and the parasympathetic systems—
and figure 6.11B shows their equivalents—lines of information flow upward,
from the controllers on the spinal cord (the squares) and from the operational
sites (the circles). The equivalent of the sympathetic system is system 2 of the
VSM. Beer understood this as attempting to damp conflicts that could arise
at the system 1 level—the various subsidiaries trying to hoard some material
in short supply to each other's detriment, for example. This damping, which
Beer knew enough not to expect to be necessarily successful, would be accom-
plished by reference to system 3. Corresponding to the pons and the medulla
at the base of the brain, system 3 would be basically an operations research
group, running models of the performance of the entire ensemble of subsid-
iaries, and thus capable, in principle, of resolving conflicts between subsidiar-
ies in the light of a vision available to none of the subsidiaries alone. 19
At this stage, no information has traveled upward beyond system 3 into
higher layers of management. The parasympathetic system, however, was en-
visaged to act somewhat differently. This traveled straight up to system 3 and
was intended to transmit an “algedonic” “cry of pain.” Less metaphorically,
production data would be monitored in terms of a set of dimensionless ratios
of potential to actual performance of the kind that Beer had introduced in his
1953, paper discussed earlier. If one of those ratios departed from a predecided
range, this information would be automatically passed onward to system 3,
which, in the light of its models, would act as a filter, deciding whether to pass
it on to levels 4 and possibly 5. 20
I am inclined to think that system 4 was Beer's favorite bit of the VSM. The
equivalent of the diencephalon and ganglia of the human brain, this had ac-
cess to all the information on the performance of the firm that was not filtered
out by system 3; it was also the level that looked directly outward on the state
of the world. If the level 1 systems had access to information directly relating
to their own operations, such as rising or falling stockpiles or order topics,