The foundation of a Viable System Model (VSM) is systems theory. Stafford Beer, a manager in the steel industry in Sheffield (UK), created it in the 1950s as a practical instrument for tackling challenges of boosting the efficiency of organizational systems. It was founded on William R. Ashby's viewpoints and works, Norbert Weiner's development of cybernetics, the mathematics of recursive systems, and Warren McCulloch's theory of neural networks. Most people couldn't understand Stafford Beer's original models since they were mathematical, but the author later produced a graphical model that illustrates the five subsystems and the complicated connections that connect them. The VSM is a holistic model, according to Stafford Beer, that includes the complex interconnections of the five recognizable, but not separate, subsystems. So let's take a look at all of the components of this model and how they operate together.
Operations (O), management (M), and the environment (E) are the three major parts of the model under discussion. The operating system is made up of three operational blocks, or operating subsystems, labeled 1a, 1b, and 1c, respectively. The management unit is divided into four subsystems: 2, 3, 4, and 5. Interactions between the five systems and the environment are frequent and complicated.
Stafford Beer's model views each organization as a cluster of autonomous operational elements whose unification is based on mutually supportive interaction aimed at creating a larger and more holistic system, and the key management task is to create the "glue" that makes this possible. This role was dubbed a metasystem by Stafford Beer, who characterized it as "the group of subsystems that oversees the operational aspects so that they align in what they do."
Therefore, the functions of subsystems 2, 3, 4 and 5 are as following (metaphorum.org):
- Subsystem 2 is dealing in problems that arise in autonomous and self-organizing operational subsystems interaction, which are imminent, so subsystem 2 is required to efficiently balancing the operational elements interaction. Without subsystem 2, the system would fall apart, according to the VSM model.
- Sub-system 3 determines the ways and directions in which to optimize the effectiveness of cooperation and collaboration among operating units, i.e., it is associated with synergy, considers the operating units from a metasystemic viewpoint and ensures that collectively the system is performing better and more effectively than its separate operating units or sub-systems. Stafford Beer described it as an "explosion of potential" arising from the cooperation and symbiotic relationship which would not have existed without subsystem 3.
- Sub-system 4 is ensuring that the whole system adapts to a constantly and rapidly changing, and sometimes violent, environment. Therefore, sub-system 4 is scanning the external environment in which the entire system operates, determining opportunities and threats, and developing and suggesting plans to manage the entire system, different options and choices that the system may follow. The system could not cope with the complexity and uncertainty of the external environment without sub-system 4.
- Sub-system 5 determines and elaborates the vision and values of the entire system by policies and procedures, it establishes the system's identity, fundamental rules. As Stafford Beer put it with regard to the fifth subsystem as follows: "The rules come from system 5: not so much by stating them clearly, but by creating the corporate spirit - the atmosphere." So, the system cannot avoid fragmentation without subsystem 5.
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Probably the most powerful argument in support of VSM is in the fact that after over 50 years, no one can find a case study that demonstrates the ineffectiveness of VSM; instead, in all of its numerous and different applications, the VSM model only demonstrates its effectiveness.