[…] the neuron and the manager — both work on the model provided in its simplest form by the wood and brass machine. For ease of reference we need to name it, and Stafford Beer choose the name algedonode.
> It is, I know, tiresome to keep introducing words which are new to the reader, especialy when (as now) I am compelled to invent them myself. And yet the vocabulary available to managers is manifestly deficient, Here is the concept we have reached as precisely as I can say it.
A decision element in a control system consists essentially of an input (or afferent) and an output (or efferent) sub-system connected by an anastomotic reticulum. All three parts of the control system were defined at some length earlier. This decision element consitutes a node in a network of decision elements making up the control system. But this node, the decision element, is conditioned (in the ways we have been studying) by a metasystem which uses the pain-pleasure heuristic method which we named an algedonic loop. The whole of this package is the algedonode. Our wood and brass machine is a crude example, but the brain’s neuron and the individual manager in a management team are also examples of algedonodes.
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Stafford Beer, Brain of the firm: the managerial cybernetics of organization, 2d ed (Chichester [Eng.] ; New York: J. Wiley, 1981), p. 67.