Beer’s Emphasis on Performance

In its full form the Viable System Model is complex; what follows is only a brief description of some of its general principles.

Despite the model’s biological origins, Beer maintained that the abstraction of the structure could be applied in numerous contexts, including the firm, the body, and the state. In keeping with Beer’s emphasis on Performance rather than Representation, it was not a model that accurately represented what these systems were; rather, it was a model that described how these systems behaved.

The Viable System Model functioned recursively: the parts of a viable system were also viable, and their behavior could be described using the Viable System Model. Beer explains: “The whole is always encapsulated in each part. … This is a lesson learned from biology where we find the genetic blue-print of the whole organism in every cell.” (Beer, Brain of the Firm, 156.)

Thus, Beer maintained that the state, the company, the worker, and the cell all exhibit the same series of structural relationships.

Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (The MIT Press, 2011), p. 34–35.