Viable System Model

The Viable System Model (VSM, German model of viable systems ) was first formulated in 1959 by Stafford Beer in his book Cybernetics and Management. It serves as a reference model for the description, diagnosis and design of the management of organizations that captures the management functions at every level of organization, representing the flow of information between the levels of the organization and helping to provide targeted questions.

The VSM is correlated with the paradigm of systems thinking, are connected in the elements by relations with each other and influence each other.

The Law of viability

Thus one can speak of viable in a system, this system must be able to adapt to external and internal changes. It must learn to perceive, learn from change, exploit all useful to evolve independently. It must not give up their own identity.

S. Beer formulated viability as follows: Non profit maximization, but survival must be the goal. Not the management of people, but the steering or controlling and regulating all organizations in their environment is crucial. Quite a few people manage, but all need to exercise certain functions of management.

Instead everything centrally or to manage from a person, created real information networks that allows real self-organization, so that everyone everything they need independently done in his area and can decide. Beer has organized with the Viable System Model people, tools and tasks so that everyone can rely on the necessary guidance, information and perspectives.

Basic structure

According to Beer every organization, every organism can be imaged by VSM, VSM is thus a universal framework. The main use, however, lies in the field of enterprise; such is divided into five sub-systems of a viable system:

  • System 1: production, operational units ( value -adding activities), these units must be viable for themselves.
  • System 2: coordination ( the value-added systems 1), place the self-organization of systems one another.
  • System 3: Optimization, (use of resources in the here and now ), System 3 *: Selective, supplementary information gathering on the state of the operating systems (audit).
  • System 4: future analysis and planning ( resource planning, there and then ), the world of options
  • System 5: Supreme decision unit ( basic decisions and interaction of system 4 with System 3), can system 3 and 4 do not agree on a common course that meets system 5 the final decision. If System 5 the decision of system 3 and 4 in favor, no intervention is needed. The decision is no intervention. In a system System 5 is to make the highest decision-making level with the main tasks of deduction and observation of system 3 and 4

Stafford Beer wrote: "The purpose of a system is what it does. And what the viable system does is done by System One. "- The purpose or use of a system do I know the system first

At every level of organization, the systems 3, 4 and 5 of the steering level ( equivalent to the area of ​​responsibility of the management ) associated with the operation level hierarchical underlying is again from a steering level with the system 3, 4 and 5 and a next lower operation level. The Viable System Model therefore has the same basic structure ( recursion) at all its levels.

The St. Gallen Management Model is in some respects a significant simplification of the VSM, because the functional systems 3, 4 and 5 in the steering level of the VSM were taken as an operational, strategic and normative management. However, while many of the details, for example, the monitoring and auditing have been neglected, as functions of the system 3

VSM has been used several times in practice, including at the country level by Chile's elected president Salvador Allende. With the help of VSM Allende said to have been able, in spite of truck strikes maintain the country's supply of all essential goods. The economic planning in real-time should ensure financing of Allende's ambitious social program. Allende's reign was cut short by assassination, infiltration of the CIA in Chile, the military coup of Pinochet and Allende before the effectiveness of the VSM could be tested in the long term.

The approach of VSM has been developed into management cockpits ( operations room, war room, ...) with real-time information, simulation models, people and project databases, as well as databases of decisions taken, together with the made ​​in assumptions and expectations

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