Anthony Stafford Beer (25 September 1926 – 23 August 2002) was a British theorist, consultant and professor at Manchester Business School.
Biography
Early life
Anthony Stafford Beer was born in
Fulham, London, on 25 September 1926. His father was William John Beer, chief statistician at Lloyd's Register of Shipping, who shared a birthday with Stafford's mother, Doris Ethel Beer.
At the age of 17 Stafford was expelled from
Whitgift School. He enrolled for a degree in philosophy at University College London before leaving to join the
British Army as a gunner in the
Royal Artillery in 1944, during the Second World War. He soon received commissions, first in the
Royal Fusiliers, and then as a company commander in the 9th Gurkha Rifles. Beer served in the
British Raj until 1947, when he returned to England and was assigned to the human factors branch of operations research at the
War Office. In 1949 he was demobilised, having reached the rank of captain.
Beer did not use his given first name, "Anthony", instead preferring his middle name, "Stafford". His younger brother, Ian, also shared this middle name. When Ian was sixteen, Beer persuaded him to sign a document promising not to use "Stafford" as part of his name because Beer "wanted the ‘copyright’ of the Stafford Beer."
United Steel
In 1956 he joined United Steel and persuaded the management to fund an operational research group, the Department of Operations Research and Cybernetics, which he headed. This was based in Cybor House, and they installed a
Ferranti Pegasus computer, the first in the world dedicated to management cybernetics.
SIGMA
In 1961 he left United Steel to start an operational research consultancy in partnership with
Roger Eddison called SIGMA (Science in General Management). Beer left SIGMA in 1966 to work for a SIGMA client, the
IPC Media (IPC). He left IPC in 1970 to work as an independent consultant, focusing on his growing interest in social systems.
His engagement in Latin America began in the 1960s through SIGMA, which worked on industrial optimisation projects in Chile and unsuccessfully explored expansion into other regional markets.
Cybersyn
In mid-1971 Beer was approached by
Fernando Flores, then a high-ranking member of the Chilean Production Development Corporation (
CORFO) in the newly elected socialist government of
Salvador Allende, for advice on applying his cybernetic theories to the management of the state-run sector of the Chilean economy.
[Third Richard Goodman Memorial Lecture, Brighton Polytechnic, Moulsecoomb, Brighton 14 February 1973.]
This led to Beer's involvement in the never-completed Cybersyn project, which aimed to use computers and a telex-based communication network to allow the government to maximise production while preserving the autonomy of workers and lower management.
Beer also was reported to have read and been influenced by Leon Trotsky's critique of the Soviet bureaucracy.["Beer also read Trotsky and found inspiration in Trotsky's critique of the Soviet bureaucracy".] According to another senior member of the Cybersyn team, Herman Schwember, Beer's political background and readings completely derived from works written by Trotsky and Trotskyists. Schwember himself disapproved of Trotsky's approach.
Although Cybersyn was abandoned after Allende's death during the Augusto Pinochet coup in 1973, Beer continued to work in the Americas, consulting for the governments of Canada, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela. Beer was particularly involved in the 1980s and 1990s on various governmental cybernetic projects, including Uruguay's successful URUCIB executive information system (1986–1988), Colombia's application of the Viable System Model to public sector reform (1990s–2000s) and unsuccessful ventures in Mexico and Venezuela that were undermined by corruption and political instability.
Later activity
In the mid-1970s he moved to
Mid Wales,
where he lived an almost austere lifestyle, developing strong interests in poetry and art. In the 1980s he established a second home on the west side of downtown
Toronto.
He was a visiting professor at almost 30 universities and received an earned higher doctorate (DSc) from the University of Sunderland and honorary doctorates from the University of Leeds, the University of St. Gallen and the University of Valladolid. He was president of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics.
Falcondale Collection
In July 1994 Beer ran a residential course at
Falcondale House in
Lampeter. Nine sessions were recorded as a video learning resource, and are collectively known as the Falcondale collection. They are available
online at the Data Repository of Liverpool John Moores University.
The sessions covered art, science and philosophy as well as the practical application of cybernetics in society, government, community, management and business. Transcripts were made of the discussions and are also available from the same repository.
Family life
He was married twice, in 1947 to Cynthia Hannaway, and in 1968 to Sallie Steadman. His partner for the last twenty years of his life was
Allenna Leonard, a fellow cybernetician. Beer had five sons and two daughters, one of whom is
Vanilla Beer, an artist and essayist.
Work
Management cybernetics
According to Mike Jackson, a systems scientist, "Beer was the first to apply cybernetics to management, defining cybernetics as the
science of effective organization". In the 1960s and early 1970s "Beer was a prolific writer and an influential practitioner" in management cybernetics. It was during that period that he developed the viable system model, to diagnose the faults in any existing organisational system. In that time Jay Wright Forrester invented
systems dynamics, which "held out the promise that the behaviour of whole systems could be represented and understood through modelling the dynamical feedback process going on within them".
[Michael C. Jackson (2000), Systems Approaches to Management]
Cybersyn
During the presidency of
Salvador Allende in Chile in the early 1970s, Beer was closely involved with a visionary project,
Cybersyn, to apply his cybernetic theories in government. The project's ultimate goal was to create a network of computers and communications equipment that would support the management of the state-run sector of Chile's economy; at its core would be an operations room where government managers could view important information about economic processes in real time, formulate plans of action, and transmit advice and directives to managers at plants and enterprises in the field.
[Raul Espejo, Cybersyn , metaphorum.org; retrieved October 2007.] However, consistent with cybernetic principles and the ideals of the Allende government, its designers aimed to preserve worker and lower-management autonomy instead of implementing a top-down system of centralised control. The system used a network of about 500
telex machines located at enterprises throughout the country and in government offices in
Santiago, some of which were connected to a government-operated mainframe computer that would receive information on production operations, feed that information into economic modelling software, and report on variables (such as raw material supplies) that were outside normal parameters and might require attention. The project, implemented by a multidisciplinary group of both Chileans and foreigners, reached an advanced prototype stage, but was interrupted by the 1973 coup d'état.
Viable System Model
The Viable System Model (VSM) is a model of the organisational structure of any viable or
autonomous system. A viable system is any system organised in such a way as to meet the demands of surviving in the changing environment. One of the prime features of systems that survive is that they are adaptable. The VSM expresses a model for a viable system, which is an abstracted cybernetic description that is applicable to any organisation that is a viable system and capable of autonomy.
Syntegration and Team Syntegrity
Syntegrity is a formal model presented by Beer in the 1990s and now is a registered trademark. It is a form of non-hierarchical problem solving that can be used in a small team of 10 to 42 people. It is a business consultation product that is licensed out to consulting firms. The term comes from the words "
synergistic" and "
tensegrity".
[ Syntegration: The Science webpage , syntegrity.com; accessed 22 August 2015.]
POSIWID
Stafford Beer coined and frequently used the term POSIWID (the purpose of a system is what it does) to refer to the commonly observed phenomenon that the de facto purpose of a system is often at odds with its official purpose. In an address to the University of Valladolid in October 2001, he said "According to the
cybernetician the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment or sheer ignorance of circumstances."
This principle has been used to describe Social Machines as intelligent, for example in the case of "games with a purpose",
and it provides a link between AI and cybernetics.
Awards
Beer received awards from the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 1958, from the United Kingdom Systems Society, the Cybernetics Society, the American Society for Cybernetics and the Operations Research Society of America.
Legacy
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The Stafford Beer Medal is awarded in recognition of the most outstanding contribution to the philosophy, theory or practice of Information Systems published in the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) within the relevant year.
Bibliography
Beer wrote several books and articles:
[ Bibliography Stafford Beer, Cwarel Isaf Institute, Juli 2000.]
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1959, Cybernetics and Management, English Universities Press.
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1966, Decision and Control, Wiley, London.
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1968, Management Science: The business use of operations research, Aldus Books, London, Doubleday, New York.
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1972, Brain Of The Firm, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London, Herder and Herder, USA.Translated into German, Italian, Swedish, French and Russian.
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1974, Designing Freedom, CBC Learning Systems, Toronto, 1974; and John Wiley, London and New York, 1975. Translated into Spanish and Japanese.
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1975, Platform for Change, John Wiley, London and New York. Reprinted with corrections 1978.
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1977, Transit; Poems, CWRW Press, Wales. Limited Edition, Private Circulation.
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1979, The Heart of Enterprise, John Wiley, London and New York. Reprinted with corrections 1988.
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1981, Brain of the Firm; Second Edition (much extended), John Wiley, London and New York. Reprinted 1986, 1988. Translated into Russian.
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1983, Transit; Poems, Second edition (much extended). With audio cassettes: Transit – Selected Readings, and one Person Metagame; Mitchell Communications, Publisher, 2693 Route 845, Carters Point, NB, Canada, E5S 1S2.
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1985, Diagnosing the System for Organizations; John Wiley, London and New York. Translated into Italian and Japanese. Reprinted 1988, 1990, 1991.
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1986, Pebbles to Computer: The Thread; (with Hans Blohm), Oxford University Press, Toronto.
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1994, Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity; John Wiley, Chichester.
Audio
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1973, Stafford Beer. "Designing Freedom" The 1973 Massey Lectures RADIO CANADA INTERNATIONAL TRANSCRIPTION: E1121 "The Real Threat to all We Most Dear", E1122 "The Disregarded Tools of Modern Man", E1123, "A Liberty Machine in Prototype" E1124, "Science in The Service of Man" 1h 53:30.
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1990, Stafford Beer, "Forty Years of Cybernetics", Gordon Hyde Memorial Lecture at the Cybernetics Society in London, January 1990 (audio file: 1hr 27mins).
Video
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1990, Stafford Beer, Stafford Beer at Monterrey Tec, March 1990 illustrated by Javier Livas
See also
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W. Ross Ashby
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Variety (cybernetics)
Sources
Further reading
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1994: Harnden, R and Allenna Leonard (Eds.), How Many Grapes Went into the Wine: Stafford Beer on the Art and Science of Holisitic Management; John Wiley, Chichester.
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2002: Rosemary Bechler and Rob Passmore, "Stafford Beer: the man who could have run the world", openDemocracy, 7 November 2002
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2003: Whittaker, David, Stafford Beer: A Personal Memoir; (Includes an interview with Brian Eno) Wavestone Press, Charlbury
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2004: "Ten pints of Beer: The rationale of Stafford Beer's cybernetic books (1959‐94)", Kybernetes, Vol. 33 No. 3/4, pp. 828–842.
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2006: Jonathan Rosenhead, "IFORS' Operational Research Hall of Fame Stafford Beer", in International Transactions in Operational Research Vol 13, nr.6, pp. 577–581.
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2009: Whittaker, David (Ed.) Think Before you Think: Social Complexity and Knowledge of Knowing; (Selected writings of Stafford Beer with life chronology), Foreword by Brian Eno, Wavestone Press, Charlbury
External links
Organizations
