Abstract
Organic life is a rich and thus appealing metaphor to which organizations like to compare. It leads away from the ubiquitous and sometimes reductionist images of organizations such as the organizational chart and process maps, and offers organizations a new way to perceive themselves. Stafford Beer himself used the human body, brain, and its central nervous system as an inspiration for his Viable System Model (VSM) to alter our understanding of organizations and their way of functioning. But what does “life” and “viability” indeed mean in the context of organizations? Without the necessary differentiations and clarifications, the metaphor of biological “life” risks becomes a buzzword. This chapter is the starting point to a more nuanced understanding of organizational viability, in whose center lies, in the end, the capacity of self-determination. The focus on viability is not the only paradigmatic shift undertaken by Stafford Beer: he also invites us to view organizations from a complexity-processing perspective. This chapter tries to elucidate the meaning of complexity for organizations and the foundational role of Ashby’s Law in the VSM and in organizations in general. Here, the key concepts and basic building blocks of the VSM such as variety and eigen-variety, as well as variety attenuators and amplifiers, will be explained in greater detail and with real-life examples.
It is the same with people as it is with riding a bike. Only when moving can one comfortably maintain one’s balance.
(Albert Einstein—Letter to his son Eduard (5 February 1930) quoted in: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007: 565))
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Notes
- 1.
“White knights” are companies that help a company threatened to be taken over by a hostile company by acquiring it instead.
- 2.
Cilliers (2002: 78) and Luhmann (1987: 46f) argue even that complexity results, in the end, of the organization itself. Since organizations are limited, they cannot reflect the environment in a one-to-one relationship, but are forced to make a choice. The necessity to reduce the environment and the inability to fully know and comprehend the environment are the factors that constitute complexity for an organization. As Cilliers rightly points out: the world as such is not complex, it simply is.
- 3.
In this regard, “variety” as a “measure“ for complexity remains relatively simple compared to other measures (see, for instance, Lloyd (2001). However, for expressing the relationships portrayed in the VSM, the term “variety” suffices, as we will see.
- 4.
See Schwaninger’s introduction of the term eigen-variety as behavioral repertory into the VSM literature and his distinction between eigen-variety and structural complexities in organizations (2006: 14). Eigen-variety not only encompasses the behavioral dimension but also the availability and quality of resources including time.
- 5.
The eigen-variety of processes and routines often consists in the knowledge developed by the organization on how to accomplish best a certain task.
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Lassl, W. (2019). Life, Viability, and the Art of Keeping One’s Balance. In: The Viability of Organizations Vol. 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12014-6_1
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