The cybernetics of organising: management and leadership

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to argue that in a strategic context organising is a cybernetic process that corresponds leadership and management. The paper reflects on the obverse condition where the lack of correspondence may facilitate failure. Design/methodology/approach -The paper applies Stafford Beer's viable systems model to consider management and leadership's relationship in the organisational context and draws on the practice of leadership and management to support the theoretical assertions. Findings -That management and leadership are key processes in organising that need to be in mutual correspondence in order to sustain the viability of the organisation.Research limitations/implications -The paper explores management and leadership from a systems perspective and so further practical work could be initiated to consider both successful organising and failure. Practical implications -The paper is attempting to demonstrate that organisations may need to develop leadership and management contiguously as control and viability drivers; and that the duopoly of management and leadership is at the heart of the cybernetics of organising. Originality/value -The paper attempts to consider the seminal cybernetic process of organising.Prologue: VSM, strategic management and leadership This paper draws on Beer's (1981) viable systems model (VSM) as a model of organising to consider the process or the cybernetics of organising. In a sense, this requires us to consider disorganising as a process that organising counters or is the obverse of. The paper infers that the resolution of such paradoxical relationships is at the heart of organisation and the root of strategic management and leadership within organisations. It may also be the case that the evolution of "paradoxical" relationships created by the connection of the ostensibly non-connectable, may be at the root of creative cybernetics.If we first consider Stafford Beer's VSM as shown in Figure 1. This model of the organisation details processes from operations (production) in system one to mechanistic control (system two), resource allocation (system three), consideration of the future (system four) to culture and ethics (system five). Without any desire to criticise the model and purely for the purpose of explanation, the model here is considered a little differently. Figure 2 shows the principle processes we need to consider for the cybernetics of organising in a strategic context. The term "strategic level" is deliberately not used; as the VSM is a democratic model of organising and so "strategic context" is the preferred notation.There are two principle processes of organising, that of maintaining the present and that of considering the future. In strategic managemsent literature, the observation of this division emerged from work initiated by Robert F. Stewart in Menlo ParkThe current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

Applying Complexity Theory to a Hospital Complex Patient Care Program

“…The VSM supports attenuation, augmentation, and organisation, to optimise information coordination and accessibility [ 1 13 ]. The VSM framework consists of five co-dependent functions represented by the symbols S1 through to S5, where each function (S) is discrete [ 14 ], and each sub-component of a system consists of all five functions. As such, subsystems are nested within larger systems as an integrated arrangement of information sharing and management (see Figure 2 ).…”

“…Finally, S5 represents the systems executive function; its direction setting and future planning, which requires all the other elements, S1 to S4, to align and to communicate [ 14 ]. For the CCP, S5 requires the cohesive orientation of all team members to the programs funded objectives: The reduction of potentially preventable hospital attendance through effective coordination of care for complex biopsychosocial health needs [ 3 ].…”

Total Defence Resilience: Viable or Not During COVID‐19? A Comparative Study of Norway and the UK

“…Beer's VSM model has been used extensively as a conceptual tool for understanding organisations, redesigning them where appropriate, and supporting the management of change (Espejo & Gill 1996). For instance, it is applied to study the knowledge management systems (Leonard, 2000), to analyse the role of leadership in viable organisations (Rowe, 2010), to enhance organizational resilience (Ruiz‐Martin et al, 2017), as a framework to guide adaptive organizational response (Cardoso‐Cadro, 2019), and most recently to review disaster risk reduction activities (Shaw, Fattoum, Moreno, & Bealt, 2020) (Figure 1).…”

Why systems must explore the unknown to survive in VUCA environments

“…The greater reward for focusing on exploitation activities causes leaders to further pursue exploitation activities instead of exploration activities and in time a significant imbalance emerges in which exploitation (management) activities dominate organisational activity at the cost of exploration (leadership) activity (Kotter, 2001). The preference for management activities over leadership activities creates organisations that are not prepared for unexpected future events and therefore suffer extreme stress or disintegration when these events arrive (Rowe, 2010).…”