Marcus Barrick

Enactive Viable Agency: A Process-Relational Grammar

Contemporary social, ecological, and organizational crises increasingly reveal failures of collective agency rather than simply failures of governance. The Viable System Model (VSM) offers one of the most powerful cybernetic frameworks for understanding organizational viability, yet its functional architecture can be difficult to interpret and operationalize without oversimplification or misapplication. This work describes the relational processes implicit within and between the subsystems of the VSM, using a process-relational grammar that renders its recursive architecture interpretable and operational across multiple domains. Drawing on Enactive Cognitive Science, the proposed grammar interprets viability through recursively organized relational processes, offering an alternative to command-and-control or purely informational interpretations of the VSM. Moreover, this emphasis reveals the structural correspondences among the VSM, the Noble Eightfold Path, and Meta-Cybernetics. This integration forms a recursive model of agency I refer to as the Enactive Viable Agency (EVA) model, which emerged through a comparative metatheoretical analysis of these models. The VSM primarily describes the recursive organization of viable systems, whereas EVA describes the reflexive dynamics through which viable agency interprets, reorganizes, and transforms itself. Applied diagnostically, EVA highlights how fragmentation of agency contributes to failures of coordination across individual, organizational, and societal systems. It provides a diagnostic framework for identifying the types of relationships needed to foster viability, with implications for the design of techno-cultural systems that augment collective agency. Thus, EVA provides an accessible, structured language that operationalizes a functional architecture of recursive agency.