Management Cybernetics

Management cybernetics is concerned with the application of cybernetics to management and organizations. "Management cybernetics" was first introduced by Stafford Beer in the late 1950s and introduces the various mechanisms of self-regulation applied by and to organizational settings, as seen through a cybernetics perspective. Beer developed the theory through a combination of practical applications and a series of influential books. The practical applications involved steel production, publishing and operations research in a large variety of different industries.

Beer initially called this "operations research" (OR) but, along with Russell Ackoff, became increasingly disenchanted with that term as the field transitioned into one in which a predefined set of mathematical tools was applied to well-formulated problems. Beer insisted that what was needed for effective research into operations was to first understand the key dynamics within the situation and only then to select the theory or methods that would allow one to understand that situation in detail. Beer's "Decision and Control", especially chapter six, discusses the methodology in some detail.

One of the great difficulties in managing the modern large organization is that many of the issues are far too complex for even small groups. The critical knowledge is often dispersed among a substantial number of people. Integration melds a number of cybernetic principles with Buckminster Fuller's ideas on tensegrity. The initial "team syntegrity" format involved 30 people divided into 12 overlapping teams to deal with some broad and initially ill-defined issues.

Organizational cybernetics studies organization design, and the regulation and self-regulation of organizations from a systems theory perspective also drawing on Beer and cybernetics, but also takes the social dimension into consideration. Extending the principles of autonomous agency theory (AAT), cultural agency theory (CAT) has been formulated for the generation of higher cybernetic orders.

There is also an extensive related field also growing out of General systems theory and cybernetics via Autopoiesis, the biological theory of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela influencing Niklas Luhmann, and research by complexity and systems theory scholars. In this context, the term autopoiesis could be likened to the principle of reproducibility in organizational outcomes.

As applied to Management, Stafford Beer defines cybernetics as "the science of effective organization."

• related to Operations Research? Management Science?
• Systems Thinking

See book The Unaccountability Machine.