Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
main features of what was undoubtedly the world's most striking cybernetic
project.
27
Taking up Flores's invitation, Beer flew into the capital of Chile, Santiago,
on 4 November 1971, remaining for eight days and returning to London on 13
November. In Santiago he met Flores and his collaborators, and together they
made plans to implement the VSM at the level of the national economy. Beer
had just completed the manuscript of
Brain of the Firm
; the Chileans studied
it while he was there, and it became the basis for their vision of Chile's fu-
ture. On 12 November Beer met President Allende himself and explained the
VSM to him. When Beer drew the box for system 5 of the VSM diagram, he
was thinking of it as representing the president, but Allende “threw himself
back in his chair: 'at last,' he said, 'el pueblo' ” (Beer 1981, 258)—the people.
Beer was so impressed by this that he told the story often. Allende was appar-
ently similarly impressed with Beer and the VSM: “ 'The President says: Go
ahead—fast' ” (257).
What did the plan sketched out on Beer's first visit look like—Project Cy-
bersyn, for “cybernetic synergy,” as it became known? Beer felt that speed
was of the essence—“within a year . . . the foreign reserves would run out”
(251)—so he aimed to begin by installing a cut-down version of the VSM by,
astonishingly, 1 March 1972. This was less than four months after his first visit,
and he promised to return on 13 March 1972. The initial plan aimed to achieve
real-time (meaning daily) communications between system 1 productive ac-
tivities at the level of individual factories, and a system 4 control room to be
constructed in Santiago.
OR teams were charged “to construct a quantitative flow chart of activi-
ties within each factory that would highlight all important activities” (253).
OR models would then be used in consultation with management—typically
workers' committees, foreign managers having fled the country—to construct
indices of performance analogous to those Beer had devised in the steel indus-
try and reported upon in the 1953 OR paper discussed above (163).
28
“In prac-
tice, it turned out that some ten or a dozen indices were adequate to monitor
the performance of every plant” (253). Among these was to be an index to
measure morale as a ratio depending inversely on absenteeism (253).
The question of what to do with all the data thus generated, how to handle
it, then arose. Ideally, every plant should have its own computer to “process
whatever information turned out to be vital for that factory's management”
(252)—this, thinking of each plant as a viable system in its own right. “But
such computers did not exist in Chile, nor could the country afford to buy
them. . . . Therefore it was necessary to use the computer power available in
