How can we imagine the Same Relationships that Allenna Leonard talks about?
A crucial aspect of the Viable System Model is that it is recursive; that is that the same Relationships [⇒ Being the Same] can be traced from the shop floor to the corporation or from the village to the country. (Allenna Leonard, The Viable System Model and Its Application to Complex Organizations, p. 223)
A Boundary Calculus reduces the complexity of all possible relationships to one: Containment.
> The only Relation within a Boundary Calculus is that of Containment, a minimal conceptual basis consisting of one binary relation. The contains relation is quite general. When expressed within logic, containment can be interpreted as implies. When expressed as a Network, containment is directly-connected-to. When expressed as a set, it’s called is-a-member. When expressed as a number, it is successor. When expressed as a map, it’s shares-a-common-border. Within the context of a pile of blocks, contains becomes supported-by. When seen as a family relationship, it is parent-of. When described as an abstract mathematical structure, it is a rooted tree. All of these metaphors share a collection of common characteristics that are concretized by the properties of physical containers. The fundamental concept underlying containment is Distinction: a Container distinguishes Inside from Outside.