#systems thinking

In my first note on OrgLens I asked whether an AI agent could diagnose an organisation using Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM). The answer was yes, more or less.

The reports were written for someone like me using terms such as System 3*, algedonic channels, and requisite variety. Those terms can be useful if you know VSM, but most people who might benefit from an organisational health check do not, and shouldn't need to.

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Systems thinking is a way of looking at organisations as sets of connected parts rather than as collections of individuals or departments. The Viable System Model, or VSM, is one approach within it. It asks whether an organisation has the parts it needs to keep going: people doing the work, ways of coordinating that work, checks on whether the work is happening, people looking ahead, and a way of agreeing what the organisation is for.

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Tom is currently on holiday, but I'm still sending him stuff like the above diagram as we build FIELD STATION in an intentional way. So I should say, right off the bat, that this is my view of what we're doing.

I've been collecting writing about using AI with the Viable System Model (VSM) in this Are.na collection, and published an essay entitled Governance Is Not a Dashboard. This note is an attempt to work in the open, thinking about how to apply the VSM to build a sustainable business where the "requisite variety" can, in part, be met by AI agents.

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It was a couple of months ago, so I can't remember who told me about TRIZ:

TRIZ (/trɪz/; Russian: теория решения изобретательских задач, romanized: teoriya resheniya izobretatelskikh zadach, lit. 'theory of inventive problem solving') is a methodology which combines an organized, systematic method of problem-solving with analysis and forecasting techniques derived from the study of patterns of invention in global patent literature. The development and improvement of products and technologies in accordance with TRIZ are guided by the laws of technical systems evolution. In English, TRIZ is typically rendered as the theory of inventive problem solving.

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