Allenna Leonard

Twenty One Years of Beer

Stafford Beer believed that cybernetic principles gave people not just a better way of seeing and understanding patterns but a series of concepts and models that could achieve a state of well-being for human beings and the planet. He often referred to this state of well-being as eudaemony - a word used by Aristotle to indicate a state of happiness. His Viable System Model conveys this well – a viable system is in harmony with the environment that sustains it and balances its management functions on behalf of the whole. This makes it easier to understand the opportunities and constraints affecting governance – from the corporation to the city and beyond. He was adamant that science was to benefit the people – not to make their lives less human and less autonomous. As the world becomes more complex, it becomes more difficult to acquire the information to make good decisions and each observer of the system has a different understanding of it. His invention of the Team Syntegrity process was designed to bring a wide enough range of perspectives to accommodate the variety that they faced. It blends well with the Viable System Model. Among the many applications of these methodologies, the work in Chile is the best known but there were many other consultancies for governments, businesses and NGO’s. All were focused on designing a system that would work for people as well as for productivity.