Three universal problems of organizing

I recently made a promise on LinkedIn to write a review on the Viable System Model (VSM). VSM is a reputedly sophisticated theory about organizing that focuses on variety and control. Indeed, ‘cybernetics?[the theory underpinning the VSM] is the study of control and a science in its own right’ (from Brain of the Firm, 2nd edition, 1981, p.17). Good summaries on VSM can be found elsewhere, so I will not go into a detailed description of VSM here. If you’re not familiar with VSM, Wikipedia is not a bad place to start.

Stafford Beer was the founding father of the VSM, and his books are notoriously tough nuts to crack. I needed a considerable amount of words to get to a satisfactory review. So I decided to split it up in three articles. This first article addresses three universal problems of organizing. I need to set the scene on these issues first, and review to what extent VSM provides relevant input against this backdrop in the next article.

Large-scale organizations are complex, but they shape our societies and our lives, they sometimes produce ‘value’ and sometimes they fail to do so, they can make our lives meaningful, but much too often they also make us feel miserable. There are three basic universal challenges to address to avoid the pains of organizing: 1) goal-setting, 2) task structure and 3) planning. Take something as simple like cooking a meal. There’s an objective (eg. not being hungry), there is a set of tasks to structure (eg. getting and preparing ingredients, cooking, eating doing the dishes,…), and ultimately these tasks need to be planned (first check the refrigerator, next go grocery shopping within store hours, then plan enough time to prepare the meal, etc.).

Note that there’s a logical order to be taken into account. The task structure follows from the objective, and planning is derived from the task structure. Below, I discuss these three challenges, and then move on to discuss to what extent VSM addresses these in the upcoming article.

?Goal-setting.

Depending on the objectives you have with your meal there is a wide variety of outcomes that you could pursue. A possible objective might be to lose weight. Or maybe the objective is becoming more healthy, or inventing a great recipe, or consoling yourself with greasy food after a stressful day. Or it could be that your objective is to seduce someone you fancy to become your lover with a romantic dinner. So goal-setting is a first way to reduce the wide variety of imaginable ways to put a meal together. If you are a bachelor, a pizza or lasagna from the freezer goes a long way to satisfy this goal. Organizing a romantic candlelight dinner to impress someone to the point of wanting to become your life companion is a whole other matter. Either way, goal-setting is a primary way to delineate the variety in tasks.

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Task structure

Choosing a goal is one thing, achieving it is another. Once a goal is set, there’s often still much variety to deal with in the task structure. Imagine the goal of the meal is to have to a romantic evening with someone that you are desperately in love with. Important choices then must be made in your task structure. You carefully choose and prepare ingredients, because you want to put something special on the table. You want the most delightful atmosphere, the right wine to go with the food, and perfect decoration for the table and the room. Rose leaves lead throughout the hallway all the way to the dining table, and so on….

Given what’s at stake here, you might be nervous about this variety of tasks. Not only is there a considerable number of choices to make within each single task (What wine to choose? Aren't rose leaves a bit too much? What about tulip leaves? Do tulips come across as too Dutch?), but there's also the interdependence between the tasks to reckon with (Does this wine go with the main dish? Is the starter a good match with the main dish?). So there you have variety in your task structure.

When the stakes are that high, you might want to call in some help. Why not hire a professional chef, have your mum go shopping for ingredients, and ask a wine expert to provide you a good bottle. Bringing more expertise in may be a good idea, but watch out: coordinating a variety of tasks across a variety of people can be challenging. Sometimes things spin out of control. In the worst case scenario: your mum couldn’t get all the ingredients, or she might have been too wayward to stick to your arrangements with the chef. So the chef had to make do with whatever was at hand. Worse, the chef now had to switch the main dish, and your expensive wine made that one taste less rather than more delicious. That was only a minor problem, compared to the allergic reaction you caused your date by the last minute ingredients. You end the evening in the hospital, and instead of displaying how caring and considerate you are, your romantic partner is now in a life threatening situation. The evening ends in drama and loneliness. Now, that’s a failure to control variety.

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Strategic and operational planning

A plan is much more than a schedule. It’s a strategy and an implementation approach to control a variety of tasks in a chronological way. Planning is a function of both the vertical and horizontal task structure. The horizontal dimension is simply the flow of work to be done in a logical sequence. Preparation needs to be done first, exection comes next. The horizontal division of work needs to be coordinated in a timeline: if the supply chain is slow, production runs into trouble. Switching the main dish in the last minute took the chef a lot longer than planned, so your date became hangry.

There are vertical dimensions to consider as well. Specific operational planning is derived from overarching strategic plans. For your candlelight dinner, the strategic objective is to convey the message ‘you’re special’, and ‘I’m caring and considerate’. A variety of decisions then relate to one another in a hierarchical order, in the sense that high-level decisions precede and determine the more concrete operational decisions. Feedback loops are needed to adjust the plan along the way when operational disturbances spring up. The chosen ingredients weren't available at the grocery store, so you can't offer what you wanted. Last minute change of plans!

As more people are involved to get the work done, planning may become more complicated. Given your anxious need for control, you choose to set up a hierarchical organization and put yourself on top of it. So you decide on all the requirements that the evening and the dinner should conform to, and then instruct other people to operationalize those requirements on your behalf (have one person cook, have another one go out shopping, and yet another one select the wine). That way you get hierarchical decision-making at the strategic level of your micro-organization, and subordinate workers down at the operational level.

Careful there, you yourself might become the planning bottleneck. Your mum tried to call you to let you know about the unavailable ingredients at the grocery store, while you were in a meeting at work. So it was too late to notify the chef that something else had to be figured out. "Argh, shoot," you might think, "if you want something done right, do it yourself." After all, this planning problem would not have occurred if you had executed the entire workflow singlehandedly. It would have given you maximum horizontal autonomy across the workflow. An alternative division of work could have spared you a lot of trouble as well. If one person was fully in charge for the starter, another one for the main dish, and yet another person for desert, there would have been less planning interdependencies across them, as each one of them would have had their own planning autonomy.

Three universal challenges of organizing

In my experience, whenever an organization does not seem to be working well, it's either one of these three challenges that aren't addressed adequately, or a combination of them. Goal-setting, task structures and planning tend to have knock-on effects on each other. When the goals are vaguely defined, the task structure is full of grey areas and blind spots, and the planning becomes a mess. As a consultant in organization design, I find myself spending a great deal of time on figuring out with my clients what rank-order should be assigned to objectives before we dive into redesigning organization structure. In evaluating organization design scenario's, the ease of getting planning coordination done is always a key quality criterion. Conversely, the inability of getting planning under control is often an important reason why organizations want to reconsider their structures and objectives in the first place. Most of the time, getting the planning tied up cannot be done by a planning system alone, but requires a revision of both goals and task structures.

So can reading Beer help you to avoid such disasters in your love life? Given that VSM purports to be the science of control, do you think that the VSM provides the concepts and methods to master the variety of organizing? There is definitely lots of interesting lessons to learn in VSM. Yet there are a few important things to note on each of these three problems that you may not read in Beer's classic book Brain of the Firm ... Maybe you can read about that in my follow-up article.

Seth