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The English cybernetician Stafford Beer devised, applied, and refined the viable systems model (VSM) over a period of 30 years. It is aimed at the diagnosis and design of organisations as autonomous systems capable of self-organisation and adaptation to changing contexts. The VSM, rooted in a cybernetics (regulation theory) approach, offers a framework for gaining vital information on a system’s functioning and ensuring its viability through requisite variety. It promotes the appropriateness and the repertoire of the system’s responses to challenges by striving to make the responses as nuanced as the problems themselves.
Beer described the VSM as an insight machine rather than a technocratic solution to problems ...
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