Changing the system?

From Changing the Strategic Game to Changing the Strategic Frame (Part #3)

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With the proposed switch in strategic focus to "changing the system", it is useful to consider the learnings of management cybernetician Stafford Beer (Platform for Change, 1975; Diagnosing the System for Organizations, 1985; Beyond Dispute: the invention of team syntegrity, 1994). In 1970, he was approached by Salvador Allende's elected socialist government of Chile to develop a national real-time computerised system Cybersyn to run the entire Chilean economy. This project was never completed. When Allende was removed from power by the 1973 coup, the Cybersyn project was abandoned. Beer continued to work in the Americas, consulting for the governments of Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela.

In the light of previous experience he had presented an adaptation of Le Chatelier's Principle (The Cybernetic Cytoblast: management itself. Chairman's Address to the International Cybernetics Congress, September 1969) in the following terms:

Reformers, critics of institutions, consultants in innovation, people in sort who "want to get something done", often fail to see this point. They cannot understand why their strictures, advice or demands do not result in effective change. They expect either to achieve a measure of success in their own terms or to be flung off the premises. But an ultrastable system (like a social institution)... has no need to react in either of these ways. It specialises in equilibrial readjustment which is to the observer a secret form of change requiring no actual alteration in the macro-systemic characteristics that he is trying to do something about

This bears reflection in the light of any argument for "changing the system".