An Introduction to Cybernetic Synergy

Improving Decision-Making and Cost Efficiency in Business and Commercial Environments

Mark Rowbotham

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000377064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Cybernetics is about having a goal and taking action to achieve that goal. Knowing whether you have reached your goal (or at least are getting closer to it) requires "feedback", a concept that was made rigorous by cybernetics.

The subject of Cybernetic Synergy, although emanating from a socio-economic experiment of economic control by cybernetic means in Chile in the early 1970s, has never been approached as an applied subject in its own right. Indeed, the subject of applied cybernetics has never been addressed as a separate issue, although it has been shown that the overall subject of cybernetics applies to a wide range of disciplines, from biology to business via mathematics and engineering.

Cybernetic synergy is the study of relationships and controls of and between corporate entities, on an external basis, and departments within corporate entities, on an internal basis. It concerns the decision-making process, and how decisions can be made based on feedback from any part of the organization being managed. It therefore concerns the issue of input of raw material or information, the output of the transformed information and materials, and the rectification of any issue based on negative feedback related to the productive process. It investigates not only the basic theory of the subject but also its applications in the commercial and business environment, as well as touching on government and administrative issues where shortcomings have emerged owing to a lack of synergy and communication.

There are already several books available on the subject to cybernetics, but they are all concerned with mathematical approaches along with very heavy technical texts, most of which are completely alien to the layman or the simple practitioner. Furthermore, other than references to business or economic practice in some books, there has never been a book published purely about the subject of applied cybernetics relating to business practices.

The book covers the subjects of management and economic cybernetics, and how the theory of cybernetic control can be used to manage business and government functions, whether small, medium or large. It looks at the history of cybernetics, and how some pioneering cybernetic concepts were used in Chile in the early 1970s to manage the Chilean economy. It uses these same principles, along with later cybernetic models, to show how such concepts can be applied to the present-day economy and business practices. It examines present-day business practices and shows how weaknesses in these systems can be addressed and eliminated by the application of cybernetic practices.

The aims of the book are to provide an insight into the subject of management and business cybernetics, using the principle of cybernetic synergy, to resolve intra-corporate issues and create more efficient business practices based on simple command-and-control processes. Essentially, this book provides an in-depth insight into the use of cybernetics in business and administration environments, and would explain how cybernetics is a valuable tool in resolving corporate issues concerning efficiency and overall control. It would give a detailed explanation of the various practices and functions involved in business operations and practices.

1

Introduction to Cybernetics

“Cybernetics” comes from the Greek word Kybernetike, meaning “the art of steering”.

Cybernetics is about having a goal and taking action to achieve that goal. It is therefore about knowing whether you have reached your goal (or at least are getting closer to it) and requires “feedback”, a concept that was made rigorous by cybernetics, in order to measure the degree or extent to which you are achieving or arriving at that goal. If we use the example of a boat crossing from one side of a wide and fast-flowing river to the other, the steering principle comes into its own. The boat starts out from its mooring and moves into the river. However, the flow of the river causes the boat to deviate from its original course in the direction of the flow of the river. The task of the steersman is to move the boat back onto its original course, all the time making adjustments to the boat’s direction against the flow of the river, until the boat arrives safely at its destination on the other side of the river. The steersman uses “feedback” based on the effect of the river flow on the boat’s course to apply corrective action.

From the Greek, “cybernetics” evolved into Latin as “governor”. From this, one can draw one’s own conclusions, as this can lead to “control”.

Cybernetics as a process operating in nature has been around for a long time; actually, for as long as nature has been around, and as a concept in society, cybernetics has been around at least since the Greek philosopher Plato used it to refer to government in general.

Cybernetic synergy, the subject of this book, is the study of the monitoring and control of relationships between corporate entities, on an external basis, and departments within corporate entities, on an internal basis.

The word cybernetics comes from the Greek κυβερνητική (kybernētikḗ), meaning “governance”, i.e. all that are pertinent to κυβερνάω (kybernáō), the latter meaning “to steer, navigate, or govern”; hence κυβέρνησις (kybérnēsis), meaning “government”, is the government, while κυβερνήτης (kybernḗtēs) is the governor or “helmperson” of the “ship”. During the second half of the 20th-century cybernetics evolved in ways that distinguish first-order cybernetics (about observed systems) from second-order cybernetics (about observing systems). More recently there is talk about a third-order cybernetics (doing in ways that embrace first- and second-order cybernetics).

In modern times, the term became widespread because the American mathematician Norbert Wiener wrote a book called “Cybernetics” in 1948. His sub-title was “control and communication in the animal and machine”. This was important because it connects control (actions taken in hope of achieving goals) with communication (connection and information flow between the actor and the environment). So, Wiener is pointing out that effective action requires communication. Later, Gordon Pask proposed conversation as the core interaction of systems that have goals.

Wiener’s sub-title also states that both animals (biological systems) and machines (non-biological or “artificial” systems) can operate according to cybernetic principles. This was an explicit recognition that both living and non-living systems can have purpose. This was a somewhat scary idea back in 1948.

The term itself began its rise to popularity in 1947 when Norbert Wiener used it to name a discipline apart from, but touching upon, such established disciplines as electrical engineering, mathematics, biology, neurophysiology, anthropology, and psychology. Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Julian Bigelow needed a name for their new discipline, and they adapted a Greek word meaning “the art of steering” to evoke the rich interaction of goals, predictions, actions, feedback, and response in systems of all kinds (the term “governor” derives from the same root; Wiener, 1948). Early applications in the control of physical systems (aiming artillery, designing electrical circuits, and manoeuvring simple robots) clarified the fundamental roles of these concepts in engineering, but the relevance to social systems and the softer sciences was also clear from the start. Many researchers from the 1940s to the 1960s worked solidly within the tradition of cybernetics without necessarily using the term, such as R. Buckminster Fuller, who referred to cybernetic principles as part of his work, but many less obviously, namely Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, who used the principle of cybernetics in their own analytical work.

In working to derive functional models common to all systems, early cybernetic researchers quickly realised that their “science of observed systems”, i.e. the first order, cannot be divorced from “a science of observing systems”, i.e. the second and higher order, because it is we who observe, as stated by Heinz von Foerster in 1974. The cybernetic approach is centrally concerned with this unavoidable limitation of what we can know, i.e. our own subjectivity. In the words of the German mathematician David Hilbert, “We must know; we will know”. In this way cybernetics is aptly called “applied epistemology”. At minimum, its utility is the production of useful descriptions, and, specifically, descriptions that include the observer in the description. The shift of interest in cybernetics from “observed systems”—physical systems such as thermostats or complex auto-pilots—to “observing systems” – language-oriented systems such as science or social systems—explicitly incorporates the observer into the description, while maintaining a foundation in feedback, goals, and information. It applies the cybernetic frame to the process of cybernetics itself. This shift is often characterised as a transition from “first-order cybernetics” to “second-order cybernetics”. Cybernetic descriptions of psychology, language, arts, performance, or intelligence (to name a few) may be quite different from more conventional, hard “scientific” views – although cybernetics can be rigorous too. Implementation may then follow in software and/or hardware, or in the design of social, managerial, and other classes of interpersonal systems.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has been linked with cybernetics and which has given rise to words concerning the completely separate field of information technology, such as “cyberspace”, is predicated on the presumption that knowledge is a commodity that can be stored inside of a machine and that the application of such stored knowledge to the real world constitutes intelligence, whether by electronic or written means. Only within such a “realist” view of the world can, for example, semantic networks and rule-based expert systems appear to be a route to intelligent machines. Cybernetics in contrast has evolved from a “constructivist” view of the world, where objectivity derives from shared agreement about meaning and where information (or intelligence for that matter) is an attribute of an interaction rather than a commodity stored in a computer, as stated by Winograd and Flores in 1986. These differences are not merely semantic in character, but rather determine fundamentally the source and direction of research performed from a cybernetic, versus an AI, stance.

The term “cybernetics” has been widely misunderstood, perhaps for two broad reasons. First, its identity and boundary are difficult to grasp. The nature of its concepts and the breadth of its applications, as described above, make it difficult for non-practitioners to form a clear concept of cybernetics. This holds even for professionals of all sorts, as cybernetics never became a popular discipline in its own right; rather, its concepts and viewpoints seeped into many other disciplines, from sociology and psychology to design methods and postmodern thought. Second, the advent of the prefix “cyb” or “cyber” as a referent to either robots (“cyborgs”) or the Internet (“cyberspace”) further diluted its meaning, to the point of serious confusion to everyone except the small number of cybernetic experts. The media talks of “Cyberattacks”. These are not attacks by robots but refer to unauthorised computer hacking. This has nothing whatsoever to do with cybernetics. Indeed, cybernetics could be used to avoid this sort of unwanted and unjustified invasion or incursion and ensure that control systems prevent this kind of occurrence.

However, the concepts and origins of cybernetics have become of greater interest recently, especially since around the year 2000. Lack of success by AI to create intelligent machines has increased curiosity toward alternative views of what a brain does, as proposed by the cybernetician W. Ross Ashby in 1960, and alternative views of the biology of cognition, according to the Chilean philosopher Humberto Maturana in 1970. There is growing recognition of the value of a “science of subjectivity” that encompasses both objective and subjective interactions, including conversation. Designers are rediscovering the influence of cybernetics on the tradition of 20th-century design methods and the need for rigorous models of goals, interaction, and system limitations for the successful development of complex products and services, such as those delivered via today’s software networks. And, as in any social cycle, students of history reach back with minds more open than was possible at the inception of cybernetics, to reinterpret the meaning and contribution of a previous era.

Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems, i.e. their structures, constraints, and possibilities. Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics in 1948 as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine”. In other words, it is the scientific study of how humans, animals, and machines control and communicate with each other.

Cybernetics is applicable when a system being analysed incorporates a closed signalling loop, originally referred to as a “circular causal” relationship, that is, where action by the system generates some change in its environment and that change is reflected in the system in some manner, known as “feedback” that triggers a system change. Cybernetics is relevant to, for example, mechanical, physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems. The essential goal of the broad field of cybernetics is to understand and define the functions and processes of systems that have goals and that participate in circular, causal chains, i.e. actions that cause effects that move from action to sensing to comparison with desired goal, and again to action. Its focus is how anything digital, mechanical or biological, processes information, reacts to information, and changes or can be changed to better accomplish the first two tasks. Cybernetics includes the study of feedback, black boxes, and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines, and organisations including self-organisation.

In cybernetics, theories tend to rest on four basic pillars, namely variety, circularity, process, and observation. Variety is fundamental to its information, communication, and control theories and emphasises multiplicity, alternatives, differences, choices, networks, and intelligence rather than force and singular necessity. Circularity occurs in its earliest theories of circular causation or feedback, leading to rectification, later in theories of recursion and of iteration in computing and now involving self-reference in cognitive organisation and in autonomous systems of production. Traditional sciences have shied away from if not exorcised the use of circular explanations. It is this circular form which enables cybernetics to explain systems from within, making no recourse to higher principles or a priori purposes, expressing no preferences for hierarchy. Nearly all cybernetic theories involve process and change, from its notion of information, as the difference between two states of uncertainty, to theories of adaptation, evolution, and growth processes. A special feature of cybernetics is that it explains such processes in terms of the organisation of the system manifesting it, e.g. the circular causality of feedback loops is taken to account for processes of regulation and a system’s effort to maintain an equilibrium or to reach a goal. Negative feedback tells the control system that something is wrong, leading the control system to rectify the issue before it causes further, and greater, problems. Finally, observation including decision-making is the process underlying cybernetic theories of information processing and computing. By extending theories of self-reference to processes of observation including cognition and other manifestations of intelligence, cybernetics has been applied to itself and is developing an epistemology of systems, i.e. how an observer knows, as opposed to what he knows, involving their observers qualitatively unlike the earlier interest in the ontology of systems, i.e. what actually exists as opposed to what appears to exist but in reality does not, which are observed from the outside.

Studies in cybernetics provide a means for examining the design and function of any system, including social systems such as business management and organisational learning, including for the purpose of making them more efficient and effective. Fields of study which have influenced or been influenced by cybernetics include game theory, as proposed by the American economist John Nash, system theory, which is a mathematical counterpart to cybernetics, perceptual control theory, sociology, psychology, philosophy, architecture, and organisational theory.

Cybernetics has been defined in a variety of ways, by a variety of people, and from a variety of disciplines. Cybernetician Stuart Umpleby reports some notable definitions:

• “Science concerned with the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing and processing information so as to use it for control” – A.N. Kolmogorov
• “‘The art of steersmanship’: deals with all forms of behaviour in so far as they are regular, or determinate, or reproducible: stands to the real machine – electronic, mechanical, neural, or economic – much as geometry stands to real object in our terrestrial space; offers a method for the scientific treatment of the system in which complexity is outstanding and too important to be ignored” – W. Ross Ashby
• “A branch of mathematics dealing with problems of control, recursiveness, and information, focuses on forms and the patterns that connect” – Gregory Bateson
• “The art of securing efficient operation [lit.: the art of effective action]” – Louis Couffignal
• “The art of effective organization” – Stafford Beer
• “The art and science of manipulating defensible metaphors” (with relevance to constructivist epistemology. The author later extended the definition to include information flows “in all media”, from stars to brains.) – Gordon Pask
• “The art of creating equilibrium in a world of constraints and possibilities” – Ernst von Glasersfeld
• “The science and art of understanding” – Humberto Maturana
• “The ability to cure all temporary truth of eternal triteness” – Herbert Brun

Other notable definitions include the following:

• “The science and art of the understanding of understanding” – Rodney E. Donaldson, the first president of the American Society for Cybernetics
• “A way of thinking about ways of thinking of which it is one” – Larry Richards
• “The art of interaction in dynamic networks” – Roy Ascott
• “The study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves” – Louis Kaffman, President of the American Society for Cybernetics

Cybernetics as a discipline was firmly established by Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth, and others, such as W. Ross Ashby, mathematician Alan Turing, and W. Grey ...