John Beckford
Beckford Consulting
Biography
A practising consultant cybernetician since 1990. An experienced Board Chair and Non-Executive Director with a focus on developing strategic and operational adaptation and transformation rooted in cybernetic reasoning. His approach seeks to enhance performance through new insights and thoughtful innovation, working especially with organisations facing challenges of adaptation, survival and growth. Leadership built on effective mentoring enables his coherent whole system approach synthesising the three dimensions of people, process and information. His experience extends across public, private and 3rd sector , includeinginfrastructure, energy, transport, housing, criminal justice, social care, health care and both service focused and manufacturing organisations. Partner in Beckford Consulting, Chair of Corehaus Ltd (MMC housing), Visiting Professor at University College London and at Loughborough University Business School . Until April 2025, he was Board Chair at Rise Mutual CIC (Domestic Abuse, VAWG) and NED at Fusion21 Ltd. (2014-2023). Currently co-supervising 3 doctoral students researching data driven decision making and 3 researching long term effectiveness of interventions with perpetrators of domestic abuse/VAWG. PhD in Management Systems and Sciences (Hull). Fellow and past President of the Cybernetics Society, Member of The Institute of Management Services, Fellow of the RSA and Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology.
Sessions
Viability: A Way of Being
John Beckford recalls Stafford Beer as a, very human, human being with the articulation of his arguments most easily understood through conversation. Beer’s evident care for humankind was expressed through the philosophy of ‘viability,’ a way of thinking rather than an alternative way of organising, a way of being rather than just a way of doing. The structural elements of Beer’s Viable System Model being a representation of activities necessary for survival rather than an alternative means of control, the pursuit of viability seeks to continuously dissolve the tension between any system, its metasystem and its environment. Building on this insight leads to participatory approaches to developing the idea of viability with people and organisations especially through the development of shared mental models. Complementing this is the recognition that cybernetics is, in human organisations, about behaviour and ethics. Developing from this is Dudley's trialogue, a reformulation of the notion of the meta-system into a multi-partite conversation continuously resolving the tensions between current and future selves through clarity of identity and purpose. If humankind is to thrive, cyberneticians need to consider more Beer’s philosophy of human well-being and less the puritanical and mechanistic adherence to a particular organisational form. Focusing on what the pursuit of viability means for human behaviour, liberty and interaction and being pragmatic in application will deliver much to a society being repressed by over-centralised governance and ultimately oppressive applications of technology. We must learn to pursue effectiveness and survival through the application and development of cybernetic ideas. The style of this chapter is deliberately conversational – though the structure follows the key threads that the editors proposed could usefully be addressed. It consciously minimises the use of titles, sub-titles and connective tissue but is rigorously referenced to enable the interested reader to pursue the multiple threads of thought.