(2024-06-19) Davies Slimmed Down Dumbed Down

Dan Davies: slimmed down, dumbed down. A gratifying, albeit terrifying, experience since writing the book has been that people have written to me saying “how would you recommend actually implementing this model?”.

in many ways the trouble with Management Cybernetics is that it had too much of a specific system.

cybernetics seems to have modelled itself more on brain surgery – you need to memorise a load of complicated structure before you can dare to make a single incision.

So, my initial advice would be that the way to actually do a cybernetic analysis of a problem would probably be along the lines of “just do the normal analysis you were planning on doing, but keeping in mind the basic ideas that the information balance sheet has to balance, with sources of environmental variety roughly matched to capability and bandwidth in the control system”.

Is it possible to do better than that? I think maybe yes. The following checklist is adapted from the one in “Creative Problem Solving: Total Systems Intervention” by Flood & Jackson

these are the most common problems to find in a Viable Systems Model analysis:

Signals simply aren’t being transmitted between different systems, or the capacity to translate them into action hasn’t been maintained, or they aren’t being transmitted fast enough.

Can we do even better than this? I’d hesitate to say it’s not possible. The people at Metaphorum and Malik think they can have success with a full-on use of Beer’s model, and I’m not in any position to gainsay them. But in my view, if there’s going to be any real chance of success for cybernetic ideas in the mainstream, it’s going to be based on the very simplest version.