Benjamin Wood
Praxis Construction Consulting
Biography
Ben Wood is a fourth-generation builder, Journeyman Carpenter, former construction project manager, independent consultant, systems thinker, and cybernetics practitioner. His experience in the trades and construction management, following an earlier education and practice in history and journalism, shaped his understanding of how knowledge, judgment, and action drive project dynamics. That experience drives his commitment to increasing worker agency, autonomy, and well-being. He is the founder of Praxis Construction Consulting and Systems Thinking in Construction. His current work explores how the Viable System Model and related systems traditions can help construction project organizations better circulate actionable information, develop shared understanding, and increase their capacity for collective purposeful action.
Sessions
Designing Heterarchy: An Extension of the Viable System Model for Complex Construction Projects
This paper proposes a heterarchical extension of the Viable System Model for complex construction projects. It argues that the canonical representation of the VSM does not explicitly represent a regulatory pathway through which semantically rich operational knowledge may directly challenge metasystemic assumptions and decisions. Thus, potentially reducing the metasystem’s capacity for learning and second-order error correction. The proposed circular topology, informed by McCulloch and Pitt’s concept of heterarchy, retains Beer's recursive regulatory functions and algedonic channel while adding an explicit, protected “challenge channel” through which frontline participants may transmit semantically rich challenges, concerns, emerging threats, and improvement proposals, based on relevant operational information, to the appropriate regulator. The challenge channel bypasses managerial suppression, but not necessary variety management. Its purpose is to reduce the attenuation and distortion of situated operational knowledge, enable anticipatory correction, and allow System 1 participants to challenge the assumptions, models, and decisions through which the metasystem regulates both their work and their continuously changing task environment. The proposed extension draws on the ideas of Gordon Pask, McCulloch, Pitts, Heinz Von Foerster and Stafford Beer. It is supplemented through observations from the management of a complex heavy-industrial construction project, where a formal organizational policy of Challenge Culture provided an empirical example of distributed challenge as a cybernetic mechanism for requisite variety management.