STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 248

time, all senior executives would treat it as a kind of club room. paper would be
banned from this place . It is what the Greeks called a phrontisterion —a think-
ing shop” (194).
System 4, then, differed from system 3 in the range of its vision, a vision
which now encompassed the future as well as the present, and Beer imagined
system 4 as a primary locus for decision making on change. If the levels below
strove to implement given production plans for the firm, level 4 was the level
at which such plans were drawn up and modified.
Finally we arrive at system 5, the equivalent of the human cortex. This was
the level where policies were deliberated upon and the most consequential
decisions were made (Beer 1981, 201). This was where the human directors of
the firm had been imagined to continue to exist in the original blueprint for
the cybernetic factory. The firm's viability and continued existence, and even
growth and evolution, were maintained by systems 1-4. The job of system
5 was, therefore, to think big at a metalevel superior to questions of mere
viability. 21
This outline of the VSM is now almost complete, but two points need to
be added. First, the various levels of the viable system were intended to be
coupled adaptively to one another. The 3 and 4 systems, for example, would
engage in the process of reciprocal vetoing discussed earlier. Level 4 might
propose some change in the overall operating plan for the firm; this would
be run through the OR models at level 3 and might be rejected there—per-
haps it would place excessive strain on one of the subsidiaries. Level 3 could
then propose some modified plan back to level 4, which could run it through
its models. Perhaps the plan would be vetoed again, once more transformed,
and returned to level 3. And so on, back and forth, until some operating plan
agreeable to both systems 3 and 4 was discovered.
Second, we should note a recursive aspect of the VSM. Beer argued that
firms were themselves parts of bigger systems—national economies, say. The
entire 1-5 structure of the firm would thus appear as a single system 1 on a
diagram of the national economy. This in turn should be a viable system with
its own levels 2-5 overseeing the ensemble of firms. Proceeding down the
scale instead of up it, each subsidiary of the firm should also be a viable system
in its own right, meaning that the level 1 systems of figure 6.11 should actually
have their own levels 1-5 within them. Figure 6.13 shows what became Beer's
standard diagram of the VSM, depicting two levels of such recursion. The
two level 1 subsidiaries in square boxes at the lower end of the spinal column
(running up the right-hand side) are shown as having their own 1-5 structure
projecting downward at an angle of 45 degrees (and each has two subsidiary