1/ When Stafford Beer had a consulting business, one of the things he liked to do was to take the company's org chart, and ask every employee "does your manager understand your job?". Then he would ask everyone above the bottom level of the org chart: "Do you understand your employees' jobs?"
2/ What he found is that most employees said that their boss did not understand their job. He also found that most bosses said that they understood their employees' jobs.
This discrepancy was so stark that he concluded that the CEO must not understand anything any rank-and-file employee did.
3/ And he tried to design organizational structures where bottom-up had a high level of understanding and top-down also had a high level of understanding. And the design results were very interesting. If the CEO's brain encompasses the whole company, the company is only as smart as one person.
4/ And one person is an idiot, no matter who that one person is.
The Viable System Model was his attempt to maximize the aggregate intelligence of a group of people engaged in the same purpose.
And that requires maximizing local autonomy, subject to the constraint of global viability.
5/ If a single team is fucking up the whole company, it needs to be monitored and its errors checked and corrected, and then released to regain its autonomy. Teams have to work together in equilibrium, and that means creating structures at work that couple teams together in synergistic ways.
6/ But ultimately the capstone is a shared ethos, not a person. The shared purpose of the organization is the boss, assuming that the whole company agrees with that purpose and had a hand in drafting the mission statement.
The structure is designed to make the whole organization less stupid.
7/ But especially the C-suite, assuming they're willing to have their egos checked by the system.
I see Elon Musk promising androids in every home and a trillion dollars in revenue, and I think, this must be a broken organization. It couldn't rein in its CEO. It must be broken.
8/ Stafford Beer, in The Heart of Enterprise, tells a story about a British factory where all the shop foremen would have tea together every Tuesday and compare notes and decide how best to use shared resources. Management found out and barred them from having tea together and talking business.
9/ The company folded 18 months later. Whatever the shop foremen were doing, it was holding the whole company together, and without it, everything fell apart.
Incidentally, SB warns that this is what always happens when you replace organic processes at the company with computer algorithms.
10/ Beer would say that it is better for the rank and file to design their own algorithms, working with coders inside the company to make sure everything works, and revisiting it quarterly to see if it still works, using daily metrics chosen by the workers to audit their processes.
11/ And Beer hardwires something like the shop foremen's tea into the structure of the system at every level of every major process going on inside the company. Without it, your teams will destroy each other, completely inadvertently. It's the biggest thing most companies miss when they organize.
12/ The other thing that most companies miss is a team that is constantly simulating the state of the company, the state of the environment it inhabits, the state of current science and technology, and the state of the customers, with an eye to envisioning what is possible to do with money and R&D.
13/ But this team should not be running the show. They should be in constant communication with operations to ensure that they're not hallucinating when they dream of the future of the company. Balancing this team with operations is the main job of senior leadership.
14/ Beer likes to say "the org chart is put there so everyone knows who to blame. It does not describe anything that is happening inside the company."
The chart of what is happening inside the company is exceedingly complex, and must be done in several iterative and recursive stages.
