Management cybernetics is the field of cybernetics concerned with management and organizations. The notion of cybernetics and management was first introduced by Stafford Beer in the late 1950s.
Overview
Cybernetics was defined by the mathematician Norbert Wiener in 1947 as the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine. That is to say that cybernetics studies the flow of information round a system and the way in which that information is used by the system as a mean of controlling itself; it does this for the animate and inanimate systems indifferently. For cybernetics is an interdisciplinary science, owing as much to biology as to physics, as much as the study of the brain as to the study of computers, and owing also a great deal to the formal languages of science for providing tools with which the behaviour of all systems can be objectively described.
Management cybernetics is the concrete application of natural cybernetic laws to all types of organizations and institutions created by human beings, and to the interactions within them and between them. It is a theory based on natural laws. It addresses the issues that every individual who wants to influence an organization in any way must learn to resolve. This theory is not restricted to the actions of top managers. Every member of an organization and every person who to a greater or lesser extent communicates or interacts with it is involved in the considerations.
Management cybernetics is founded and first developed by Stafford Beer since the 1960s. His management theory is not limited only to industrial and commercial enterprises. It also relates to the management of all types of organizations and institutions in the profit and non-profit sectors:
- from individual enterprises to huge multinationals
- in the private and public sector
- in associations and political bodies
- and lastly in professional and private life
Institutions in the sense of general legal and contractual regulations are also covered.
History
The earliest systems models, used in management studied organizations as mechanical systems in equilibrium. The idea of studying social system in this way, was originally derived from Pareto in 1919 and was promoted in the United States by Henderson at Harvard in the 1930s. Henderson saw organizations made up of parts in mutual interaction. From the 1930s onward three different models of management competed for precedence in organization theory - the traditional approach, human relation theory and systems theory.
In 1948 Wiener published the book Cybernetics, bringing together ideas about control process. Ashby in his Introduction to Cybernetics noted that cybernetics should reveal parallels between machine, brain and society. It was the Beer with his Cybernetics and management in 1959 that got managers and management scientists interested According to Beer by then several attempts had been made to give a systematic exposition of the science of cybernetics, and had drawn attention to the relevance to various orthodox fields. Some biologists have been quick to realise the value of cybernetics to them. Some engineers too, were well aware of the importance of the subject to engineering, and to automation in particular. The social sciences were conscious of their need for a formal framework of a cybernetic kind. The distinguished anthropologist Margaret Mead and Simons essays in this area were notable. Economists, too, had seizes a similar point. But the exposition of Beer's Cybernetics and management was the first directed to the relevance of cybernetics to industrial management.
Beer was the first to apply cybernetics to management, defining management as the "science of effective organization". Throughout the 1960s Beer was a prolific writer and an influential practitioner. It was during that period that he developed the viable system model, to diagnose the faults in any existing organizational system. In that time Forrester invented systems dynamics, which held out the promise that the behavior of whole systems could be represented and understood through modeling the dynamical feedback process going on within them.
Organizations as systems gradually developed to become the dominant approach in the 1960s and 1970s. Systems people whether theorists or practitioners operated from within the same paradigm. Summarizing greatly that systems of all types could be identified by empirical observation of reality, and could be analyzed by essentially the same methods that brought success in the natural sciences. Systems could then, if the interest was in practice, be manipulated the better to achieve whatever purpose they were designed to serve. Systems thinking until the 1970s, therefore, was dominated by the positivism and functionalism characteristics of the traditional version of the scientific method. We can call this kind of systems the traditional systems approach. It embraces strands of work such as "organizations as systems", general systems theory, contingency theory, operations research, systems analysis, systems engineering, and management cybernetics.
During the 1970s and 1980s traditional systems thinking became subject to increasing criticism. As a result alternative systems were born and flourished for example "soft systems thinking", "organizational cybernetics" and critical "systems thinking".
Management cybernetics Topics
Control
The concept of control is of fundamental importance to organizations. It has been identified as a significant influence on:
- the formation of organizational strategy,
- the design of organizational structure,
- the selection, socialisation and evaluation of personnel and
- the ongoing process of leadership and motivation.
The concept of control itself is a subject of scientific reflection in Management cybernetics.
With the years the definition of control has broadened. And according to some its meaning has lessened. Originally the discussion of control to business organizations referred to monitoring employee behavior. Over time a broader definition has developed making it synonymous with the concept of power and influences.
Decision making
Systems theory and related areas such as computer science, information theory, and management cybernetics have long been devoted to the study of decision-making. A common assumption of these areas is that all organism are information systems.
The characteristics of a decision situation are:
- A problem exists.
- At least two alternatives for action remain.
- Knowledge exists of the objective and its relationship to the problem
- The consequences of the decision can be established and sometimes quantified
Decision making by management staff can also be practised in computerized business simulators that are made to resemble the ordinary decision environment as closely as possible. Beer's "decision room" or Frontesterion is an example of such an environment.
Modelling
Scientific models are not descriptors nor are they pointers toward some neutral, objective reality, but are consensual conventions which enable particular understanding and coordination of activity in a community of observers. Impeccable communication of a model entails making visible this activeconsensual function, rather than simply pursuing a more detailed investigation of the phenomenon considered as the source or origin for the model.
The starting point for the management cybernetic model of the organization is the input – transformation – output schema. This is used to describe the basic operational activities of the enterprise. The goal or purpose of the enterprise is, in management cybernetics, invariably determined outside the system (as with a first-order feedback arrangement). Then, if the operations are to succeed in bringing about the goal, they must, because of inevitable disturbance, be regulated in some way. This regulation is effected by management. Management cybernetics attempts to equip managers with a number of tools that should enable them to regulate operations. Chief among these are the black box technique and the use of feedback to induce self-regulation into organizations. The latter is often supplemented by strategic control, based on feed-forward information, and external control. According to Jackson (2000) management cybernetics makes little use of the more complex, observer-dependent notion of variety, and organizational cybernetics the more. Stafford Beer (1985) confirms variety as fundamental to matching resources to requirement and the measurement of performance.
Systems
Beer defined a system as anything that consists of parts connected together (1959, p.9).
Viable System Model
The Viable Systems Model is a abstract model of the organisational structure of any viable or autonomous system. A viable system is any system organised in such a way as to maintain its identity in a changing environment. One of the prime features of systems that survive is that they are adaptive. The VSM is a model for a viable system, - an abstracted cybernetic description that is applicable to any organisation.
Close related fields
Entrepreneurial cybernetics
Similar to management cybernetics, entrepreneurial cybernetics is primarily concerned with applying the knowledge gained from general cybernetic theories applicable in everyday business contexts. Rules and methods for establishing and improving regulation, control and communication are focused on helping and supporting small and medium-sized enterprises. Such businesses act as a major driving force in many of today’s economies and it is therefore important that entrepreneurial cybernetics offers them new ways of thinking and approaching business so that they can survive in increasingly complex and competitive markets.
Organizational Cybernetics
Organizational cybernetics is distinguished from management cybernetics. Both uses many of the same terms but interpret them according to another philosophy of systems thinking. Organizational cybernetics by contrast offers a significant break with the assumption of the hard approach. The full flowering of organizational cybernetics is represented by Beer's Viable System Model.
Organizational Cybernetics (OC) studies organizational design, and the regulation and self-regulation of organizations from a systems theory perspective that also takes the social dimension into consideration. Researchers in economics, public administration and political science focus on the changes in institutions, organisation and mechanisms of social steering at various levels (sub-national, national, European, international) and in different sectors (including the private, semi-private and public sectors; the latter sector is emphasised).
Organizational Cybernetics has contributed to the analysis of what is arguably one of the most remarkable developments in modern societies in the past few decades: the transformation of traditional governing mechanisms (‘government’) and the advancement of new forms of ‘governance’. This development is most obvious in the private, the semi-private and the public sectors and involves the local, regional, national, transnational, and global levels within these sectors.
Sociocybernetics
Sociocybernetics is the science and art of steering societies. Sociocybernetics is an applications of GST and first-and second-order cybernetics to the social sciences. Actually, sociocybernetics is to a large extent based on second-order cybernetics, which was developed precisely because first-order cybernetics had only a limited applicability to the social sciences, where the researcher himself forms part of the subject under investigation, in contrast with the natural sciences.
Organizations
There are few organisations particular specialized in management cybernetics. A selection of organizations related to management cybernetics:
- Centre for Systems Studies, Hull University Business School, Hull, United Kingdom: Founded in 1992, the Centre for Systems Studies is an internationally renowned research group, unique in its interdisciplinary research agenda of critical systems thinking, information systems, logistics and supply chain management. With Mike Jackson specialized in Systems thinking, management cybernetics, critical systems practice as one of the core members.
- Cwarel Isaf Institute, Ceredigion, Wales, United Kingdom.
- This institute was founded in 2001 by Stafford Beer and Fredmund Malik to make the life's work of Stafford Beer available to society. Its purpose is the systematic development and application of Management Cybernetics - the teachings of Stafford Beer. central question are:
- What is the nature of complex systems? What are the effects of complexity? What happens if we handle complex systems wrongly and what if we handle them correctly? When do we refer to a system as complex anyway? What are Management Cybernetics and what is their "secret"? Even your little toe is a highly complex system. Your company or your institution certainly is one. Whether it be your toe or your company, both of them have a common pattern of working if they are viable. You can use this pattern in every life situation if you recognise and understand it.
- Cybernetics College of Technology, Southern Cross University Australia.
- Institut für Unternhemenskybernetik, Aachen, Germany.
- This German research institution dedicated to advancing the study of Entrepreneurial cybernetics and management cybernetics, is founded in 1988. The aim of this institute is to study and optimise business processes in organisations.
- Institute for Management Research', Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands has a research program in organisational cybernetics.
- At the Radboud University organizational cybernetics focuses on the study of organizational design, and the regulation and self-regulation of organizations from a systems theory perspective that also takes the social dimension into consideration. Researchers in economics, public administration and political science recently began focusing on the changes in institutions, organisation and mechanisms of social steering at various levels (sub-national, national, European, international) and in different sectors (including the private, semi-private and public sectors; the latter sector is emphasised). They have contributed to the analysis of what is arguably one of the most remarkable developments in modern societies in the past few decades: the transformation of traditional governing mechanisms (‘government’) and the advancement of new forms of ‘governance’. This development is most obvious in the private, the semi-private and the public sectors and involves the local, regional, national, transnational, and global levels within these sectors.
Applications
Some examples:
- Academic organization: Management cybernetics supplies ideas, that may help college and university administrators develop a more coherent and integrated view of the institutions they inhabit. It can help think in more complex ways about their work and improving their performance. In this field ideas have been developed by many scholars in a number of fields over a period of more than 50 years. Management cybernetics has helped here to:
- Project Cybersyn (Chile 1970-1973) was the first application of formal cybernetic methods to the government of a country. Stafford Beer developed the Viable System Model he applied in Chile for the management of complex enterprises from his foundational work in management cybernetics. Real- time performance monitoring in actuality, capability and potential, variety analysis, algedonic alerting and participatory development modelling were all new then. The approach came out of Wiener's work on purposeful error correction and the inter-disciplinary focus it produced on self-organisation and autonomy. Now these techniques are becoming mainstream. Cheap high performance multimedia computing supporting email, workflow and data mining on the web can realise this potential. But still company and government accounts, for example, are produced seasonally reflecting agricultural practice rather than the real-time needs of a developing "postcode lottery" society unable or unwilling to regulate waste and allocate resources fairly.
Examples of other applications:
Criticism
Jackson in 2000 stated that, management cybernetics represents little advance on hard systems thinking and is subject to the same criticisms. There is little to choose between the two. Conventional management scientists are able to take cognizance of its insights and to employ concepts such as feedback in their traditional analyses. Management cybernetics, therefore, offers no new direction in systems thinking. Whether based on a machine analogy or on a biological analogy, it can be criticized for exactly the same reasons as hard systems thinking – an inability to deal with subjectivity and with the extreme complexity of organizational systems, and for an inherent conservatism.SEE ALSO
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