I had the privilege of hearing Stafford Beer give a talk in the 1990s when I was a PhD student. It was fascinating stuff. He told us all about his Chilean experience and showed slides with photographs of the Heath Robinson equipment they had available.
At that time I was studying as an apprentice academic but my primary mentors weren't other more senior academics but working engineers who had earned their spurs in the defence industries.
They were the ones who understood systems theory and cybernetics. They also understood the need for autonomy and local control. They saw how large defense projects produced unreliable kit and were always late and over budget. They viewed Beers vision of cybernetics as an answer to this.
But in practice what they got instead was overly rigid centralised planning with unrealistic schedules accompanied by always changing requirements. This environment always played into the hands of the defence contractors who then extracted excess profits from the chaos.
What I discovred was that hiding behind the gloss and sheen of modern technocratic control are more ancient practices of corruption, graft and theft.
You'd perhaps be surprised that systems theory, for social systems at least, is hardly taught now in universities now and virtually unknown in industry. Instead a highly bastardised, dumbed down, shadow of these practices is used instead. KPIs, risk registers, balanced scorecards etc. What these have in common is that they centralise and impose decision making from above. Indeed they actively discourage and ignore causality and complexity, making managers mere cogs in the machine.
In my book, KPIs and Results-Based Management operate like a Spinozean 'experience': they establish an organisational substance, define its attributes, and anticipate predictable outcomes.
And once you have one, you can link the output of one to become the input of the next, and pretend you can predict far ahead, thus enabling 5-year plans in the most Soviet of styles.
This is fascinating. You keep leading me into rabbit holes I didn't even know existed which is why I subscribed in the first place. On your previous post in reply to a reader's comment you mentioned PPBS. I had never heard of it so I looked it up and started a document intending to dig deeper then here you are today illuminating the subject with tantalising detail. Excellent.
i covered PPBS through a 4-part article. if you seek to condense, there should be plenty of source links, including a number of CIA declassified documents which should be a pretty good start at the very least.
but this link - also included in above - is also worth reading in full, because it spills the beans on what PPBS, and confirms its alignment with systems analysis, and so forth. i was going to cover it specifically in the post, but then changed my mind because I've already run through so many aspects of PPBS already through the 4 parter.
but do read it. it's one of the better documents on the topic i've dug up.
I had the privilege of hearing Stafford Beer give a talk in the 1990s when I was a PhD student. It was fascinating stuff. He told us all about his Chilean experience and showed slides with photographs of the Heath Robinson equipment they had available.
At that time I was studying as an apprentice academic but my primary mentors weren't other more senior academics but working engineers who had earned their spurs in the defence industries.
They were the ones who understood systems theory and cybernetics. They also understood the need for autonomy and local control. They saw how large defense projects produced unreliable kit and were always late and over budget. They viewed Beers vision of cybernetics as an answer to this.
But in practice what they got instead was overly rigid centralised planning with unrealistic schedules accompanied by always changing requirements. This environment always played into the hands of the defence contractors who then extracted excess profits from the chaos.
What I discovred was that hiding behind the gloss and sheen of modern technocratic control are more ancient practices of corruption, graft and theft.
You'd perhaps be surprised that systems theory, for social systems at least, is hardly taught now in universities now and virtually unknown in industry. Instead a highly bastardised, dumbed down, shadow of these practices is used instead. KPIs, risk registers, balanced scorecards etc. What these have in common is that they centralise and impose decision making from above. Indeed they actively discourage and ignore causality and complexity, making managers mere cogs in the machine.
In my book, KPIs and Results-Based Management operate like a Spinozean 'experience': they establish an organisational substance, define its attributes, and anticipate predictable outcomes.
And once you have one, you can link the output of one to become the input of the next, and pretend you can predict far ahead, thus enabling 5-year plans in the most Soviet of styles.
This is fascinating. You keep leading me into rabbit holes I didn't even know existed which is why I subscribed in the first place. On your previous post in reply to a reader's comment you mentioned PPBS. I had never heard of it so I looked it up and started a document intending to dig deeper then here you are today illuminating the subject with tantalising detail. Excellent.
i covered PPBS through a 4-part article. if you seek to condense, there should be plenty of source links, including a number of CIA declassified documents which should be a pretty good start at the very least.
but this link - also included in above - is also worth reading in full, because it spills the beans on what PPBS, and confirms its alignment with systems analysis, and so forth. i was going to cover it specifically in the post, but then changed my mind because I've already run through so many aspects of PPBS already through the 4 parter.
but do read it. it's one of the better documents on the topic i've dug up.
https://afsa.org/sites/default/files/fsj-1968-02-february_0.pdf
Thanks for that and what was the title of your 4 part article on PPBS?
Inaugurated in Dallas. Linked above.