Brain of the Firm - Stafford Beer

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Preface to first edition

This book is about large and complicated systems, such as animals, computers, and economies.

It is in particular about the control of the enterprise, the brain of the firm

this book turns out to begin three times – which is why it comes in three parts. The first establishes some talk. The second says what I really wanted to say, using the talk. The third (hopefully) says what the reader really wanted to hear, given that he has already heard what I really wanted to say

In communication everything depends on what you end up with, not on what was actually said or written down. Here you are supposed to end up with an insight, not with an agglomeration of facts

In particular, we can choose a whole new vocabulary if we like. For the moment, I have had to choose one, because I am starting this communication. Many will find it strange. But words are only names: please do not be put off by my names. Please have an agreement with me about them. I say all this because I find that cybernetics especially (these are cybernetic writings) leads people to argue with fervour about names – forgetting the ideas they name. Though all communication runs the same sort of risk.

Preface to second edition

The original edition of this book was published in 1972

the original English text has been inconveniently out of print since early in 1975

Publication rights in Brain were courteously returned to me

By this time, however, two things had happened. A massive application of this whole approach to management cybernetics had been undertaken (1971-73) in Chile. The eventual overthrow of President Allende’s administration was as traumatic an experience for me as for many others who, though not born Chileans, had reason to identify themselves with the nation’s suffering. Years were to pass before I felt able to review all my Chilean papers, and to write a full personal account of the applications – an account which now appears in a new Part (Chapters Sixteen to Twenty) of this second edition

Secondly, if secondarily, I had been engaged in the writing of two other books: Platform for Change, which John Wiley published in 1975, and The Heart of Enterprise, which that same house issued late in 1979. The latter work, however, is the companion volume to this

prepared in parallel

There was of course a temptation to rewrite everything, but this seemed unfair to those already familiar with the first edition. In reviewing that text, I have made additions, rather than alterations. The structure and chapter headings remain as before

The final problem about the presentation of this fresh edition concerns its title. Even in 1972, the apparent limitation of the cybernetics of the viable system to ‘the firm’ was too restrictive – because applications to other kinds of enterprise, and especially government, were already in train. With the inclusion of all the new material in Part Four, the title is strictly a misnomer. However, it simply does not seem either legitimate or helpful to use a new title for a book the substance of which is already established.

I allow myself one final reference to a bodily organ – relating as it does to the business of managerial and ministerial innovation

The figure of Prometheus is pictured on a medal that was presented to me in Sweden in 1958... said Edy. ‘The medal is indeed for innovators, but the point about Prometheus is that he was chained to a rock and had his liver pecked out.’

The reward-and-penalty structure in management heavily disfavours innovation: it is a fact which demands fresh thinking if our institutions are to survive.

Acknowledgements

I salute the memory of those three grandfathers of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and WR Ashby, with much affection

Summary of Part One

We begin (Chapter One) by trying to understand what is special about today’s managerial problems. There does indeed seem to be something unique and it has to do with the rate of change

The tool we have which might have coped with this problem, because it is fast and flexible, is the electronic computer. But we have not understood how to use it. This book is about what to do next.

We need a new insight, which the science of cybernetics can provide

I have not been able to write this book without introducing some new terms. They are there to name new concepts, or concepts which come from other sciences. If Chapter Two is read carefully, and the reader doggedly refuses to be put off, he will be armed with the first set of the tools he needs

Next (Chapter Three), we start to use the tools. Here the really fundamental problem of management is discussed and analysed. It is the problem of complexity: how to measure it, how to manipulate it

We think of our problems as concerned with such things as men, materials, machinery and money – and their interaction. It is just that interaction that causes the difficulties, and we must get at its nature

We must also get at the nature of the way huge numbers of states in a system soak each other up – which is the subject of Ashby’s Law. It turns out that organization exists precisely to implement that cybernetic law

By the end of Chapter Three the fundamental reasons should be clear why things cannot be organized down to the last iota (and why in human terms we should not even want to try). Of course, we all know that they cannot be so organized, that indeed an awful lot of things just organize themselves. But when we know exactly why, we can approach the problem of how

This is the subject of Chapter Four – the nature of self-organization in very large systems. By understanding these principles properly, we may well be able to facilitate regulation without imposing it. And that is something all good managers try to do.

In Chapter Five the simple algedonode is used as a building block to construct a larger system. And the object of understanding that system is to discover the meaning of hierarchy in organizations.

Chapter 1: Let’s Think Again

At very long last something seems to be happening in management. Younger, more vigorous, more intent, and more scientifically orientated managers are to be found in senior jobs

I speak of these signs that something is happening in a strained voice, and with the air of a shipwrecked mariner sighting a sail

Those two paragraphs, first drafted nearly ten years ago, opened the first edition of this book. In revision, it would seem that all that is required is to change the word ‘seventy’ to ‘eighty’. But that would not be honest. The managerial change that I remarked has foundered, I fear. ‘This is how we do it here’ has became the basic slogan all over again

Adventurous ideas soon become constrained by the observed fact that their proponents cannot think them through to a proper conclusion

we seem for so long to have been saying that a fantastic change in the rate of technical progress is ‘only’ a matter of degree; our culture does not admit of surprise, and claims to see the pattern of things. It does not allow itself to become excited

It is to the rate, rather than to the changes themselves, that we have to adapt. Consider, then, if we are to talk of space rockets, man’s capacity to travel at speed. For most at the last two thousand years the best that he could do was to climb on the back of a horse and gallop. The first alteration in this picture occurred quite recently with the invention of the steam engine. In rapid succession came the internal combustion engine, the turbine, and then the rocket itself

Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely (for science is a unity and so is nature), very similar curves are obtained when we try to measure progress in any other human capability. For example, in communications the speed of message transmission was until very recently tied firmly to the speed of travel

In computing, the position is the same. For most of the two thousand years under review, people were mostly limited in computational facility by their ability to count on their fingers or with pebbles

The present-day computer (1970) is already 1,000,000 times faster than the original machines of the late 1940s, and by the year 2000 they will predictably be a thousand million times faster. Here is the second intervention of the new edition. The prediction above is on course. Computers are somewhere between ten and a hundred million times faster than they were in the late 1940s, and the prediction for the year 2000 may be an underestimate

But their sheer speed is as nothing compared with their cheapness

All our capabilities are expanding by factors of perhaps a million times or so within our own lifetime, and simply cannot be regarded as normal to earlier human existence in general

The whole rate of progress is explosive, and there is hardly a human capability which remains static long enough for us to adapt to it. We therefore feel unease.

the whole structure of society has this same problem of adaptation, and unless our children can invent what amounts to a new way of living in a single generation our species may be doomed

We ourselves are trapped in our own social and cultural patterns

When we come to management, whether of the firm, or of the country, or of international affairs, the same problem of adaptation exists. This seems to me to identify the managerial challenge.

And if it is the rate of change in technology which poses these problems for us, there seems to be no alternative but to turn to science itself for their solution. Modern management must be about this

What is needed now is a total reappraisal of our way of managing, which entails in turn a reconsideration of our traditional organization for the purpose

The second line of thought which emerges from the original consideration is of a different kind. It is provoked by the suggestion that the population of the world ‘looks like’ becoming imminently infinite. No one, I suspect, will believe that this is really going to happen. Why not? It may of course be sheer terror. But a cooler judgement suggests that, just as nature does not make jumps, it does not lightly run to infinities

In the case of the curves we have been considering, we should note that they are envelope curves composed of smaller curves dealing with technological epochs – which themselves tail off. Now this tailing off is typical of growth processes in nature. Their curves tend to be S-shaped, (s-curve)

And if the component curves tail off, then it seems probable that the total curve we are considering will also tail off

In Figure 2, then, appears the typical growth curve which is found in nature. We may study it in the biological context – in our own growth for example; in the economic context, such as the growth of markets, or even in the inanimate world wherein things are made to grow

In tracing the advance of progress through a technological epoch, we find much the same phenomena

This is in acknowledgment of the law of diminishing returns. The technologies used in business, and indeed the businesses themselves, will normally follow this pattern. What happens next is fairly alarming. The level of performance, however it may be measured, will continue perhaps for some time. After that, if it does not simply stultify, it may actually decline

A decision must be taken to superimpose a new growth curve upon the old

acquiring new staff and facilities in a proven but novel field, which is quite foreign to both the managers who run things and to the work force who operate things. So that experience is likely to be traumatic.