Stafford Beer

Anthony Stafford Beer (25 September 1926 – 23 August 2002) was a British cyberneticist, management theorist and consultant, operational researcher and professor at Manchester Business School. He is known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics (the latter of which he founded), specifically in relation to Project Cybersyn, of which he was the principal architect. He is also known for his heuristic in systems thinking that "the purpose of a system is what it does".

Biography

Early life Anthony Stafford Beer was born in Fulham, London, on 25 September 1926. His father was William John Beer, chief statistician at Lloyd's Register of Shipping, who shared a birthday with Stafford's mother, Doris Ethel Beer. At the age of 17 Stafford was expelled from Whitgift School. He enrolled in philosophy at University College London before enlisting in the British Army as a gunner in the Royal Artillery in 1944, during the Second World War. He soon received commissions, first in the Royal Fusiliers, and then as a company commander in the 9th Gurkha Rifles. Beer served in the British Raj until 1947, when he returned to England and was assigned to the human factors branch of operational research at the War Office. In 1949 he was demobilised, having reached the rank of captain. Beer did not use his given first name, "Anthony", instead preferring his middle name, "Stafford". His younger brother, Ian, also shared this middle name. When Ian was sixteen, Beer persuaded him to sign a document promising not to use "Stafford" as part of his name because Beer "wanted the ‘copyright’ of [the name] Stafford Beer."

United Steel In 1956 he joined United Steel and persuaded the management to fund an operational research group, the Department of Operations Research and Cybernetics, which he headed. This was based in Cybor House, and they installed a Ferranti Pegasus computer, the first in the world dedicated to management cybernetics.

SIGMA In 1961 he left United Steel to start an operational research consultancy in partnership with Roger Eddison called SIGMA (Science in General Management). Beer left SIGMA in 1966 to work for a SIGMA client, the International Publishing Corporation (IPC). He left IPC in 1970 to work as an independent consultant, focusing on his growing interest in social systems. His engagement in Latin America began in the 1960s through SIGMA, which worked on industrial optimisation projects in Chile and unsuccessfully explored expansion into other regional markets.

Cybersyn

In mid-1971 Beer was approached by Fernando Flores, then a high-ranking member of the Chilean Production Development Corporation (CORFO) in the newly elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, for advice on applying his cybernetic theories to the management of the state-run sector of the Chilean economy. This led to Beer's involvement in the never-completed Cybersyn project, which aimed to use computers and a telex-based communication network to allow the government to maximise production while preserving the autonomy of workers and lower management. Beer also was reported to have read and been influenced by Leon Trotsky's critique of the Soviet bureaucracy. According to Herman Schwember (1939-2008), another senior member of the Cybersyn team, former Professor of Fluid Mechanics and Vice-Rector of the Catholic University of Chile, later exiled to London, Beer's political background and readings completely derived from works written by Trotsky and Trotskyists. Schwember himself disapproved of Trotsky's approach. Although Cybersyn was abandoned after Allende's death during the Pinochet coup in 1973, Beer continued to work in the Americas, consulting for the governments of Canada, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela. Beer was particularly involved in the 1980s and 1990s on various governmental cybernetic projects, including Uruguay's successful URUCIB executive information system (1986–1988), Colombia's application of the Viable System Model to public sector reform (1990s–2000s) and unsuccessful ventures in Mexico and Venezuela that were undermined by corruption and political instability.

Later activity In the mid-1970s he moved to Mid Wales, where he lived an almost austere lifestyle, developing strong interests in poetry and art. In the 1980s he established a second home on the west side of downtown Toronto. He was a visiting professor at almost 30 universities and received an earned higher doctorate (DSc) from the University of Sunderland and honorary doctorates from the University of Leeds, the University of St. Gallen and the University of Valladolid. He was president of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics.

Falcondale Collection

In July 1994 Beer ran a residential course at Falcondale House in Lampeter. Nine sessions were recorded as a video learning resource, and are collectively known as the Falcondale collection. They are available online at the Data Repository of Liverpool John Moores University. The sessions covered art, science and philosophy as well as the practical application of cybernetics in society, government, community, management and business. Transcripts were made of the discussions and are also available from the same repository.

Family life He was married twice, in 1947 to Cynthia Hannaway, and in 1968 to Sallie Steadman. His partner for the last twenty years of his life was Allenna Leonard, a fellow cybernetician. Beer had five sons and two daughters, one of whom is Vanilla Beer, an artist and writer.

Work

Management cybernetics According to Mike Jackson, a systems scientist, "Beer was the first to apply cybernetics to management, defining cybernetics as the science of effective organization". In the 1960s and early 1970s "Beer was a prolific writer and an influential practitioner" in management cybernetics. It was during that period that he developed the viable system model, to diagnose the faults in any existing organisational system. In that time Jay Wright Forrester invented systems dynamics, which "held out the promise that the behaviour of whole systems could be represented and understood through modelling the dynamical feedback process going on within them".

Cybersyn

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