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Figure 6.12. World War II operations room, near London, during the Battle of Brit-
ain. Source: Beer 1968a, 23.
level 4 had much wider access, to national economic policies and changes
therein, say, to the price of money, the results of market research, and what
have you. System 4 was, then, the T-U-V system of Beer's earlier model, with
the humans left in.
Beer envisaged system 4 as a very definite place. It was, in fact, modelled
on a World War II operations room, of the kind shown in figure 6.12 (taken
from Beer's 1968 topic Management Science ), as developed further by NASA
at “Mission Control in the Space Centre at Houston, Texas, where the real-
time command of space operations is conducted” (Beer 1981, 193-94), and
updated with all of the decision aids Beer could think of (194-97). All of the
information on the state of the firm and of the world was to be presented vi-
sually rather than numerically—graphically, as we would now say. Dynamic
computer models would enable projections into the future of decisions made
by management. Simply by turning knobs (197), managers could explore the
effects of, say, investing more money in new plant or of trends in consump-
tion. Feedbacks that had passed the level 3 filters would also arrive at system
4 from the lower levels, “signalled appropriately—that is, if necessary, with
flashing red lights and the ringing of bells” (194), alerting management to
emerging production problems, perhaps to be passed on again to level 5. In
terms of social organization, “I propose a control centre for the corporation
which is in continuous activity. This will be the physical embodiment of any
System 4. All senior formal meetings would be held there; and the rest of the
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