System Survival Model

CORE DEFINITION

The viable system model, developed by Stafford Beer, holds that any system capable of maintaining its own existence must perform five functions: operations, coordination, optimization, intelligence about the environment, and policy. Each of these is recursively organized, so every subsystem must itself contain a complete set of the five. The core proposition is that viability is a structural property, so an organization that lacks one of the functions, or where they are badly connected, will fail regardless of the quality of its people. The key qualification is the balance between autonomy and cohesion, since over-centralizing the higher functions damages viability as surely as omitting them.