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The Guardian
Wednesday September 4, 2002
Dick Martin and Jonathan Rosenhead
Stafford
Beer
World leader
in the development of operational research, who combined
management systems with cybernetics
Professor Stafford
Beer, who has died aged 75, was a remarkable figure of British
operational research (OR) - the study of systems that emerged
from deploying newly invented radar in the late 1930s, and has
since found extensive management applications.
A charismatic, even flamboyant, character, Beer
founded two major pioneering OR groups; wrote some of the best
books about it; and was a world leader in the development of
systems ideas. He is widely acknowledged as the founder of
management cybernetics, which he defined as "the science of
effective organisation".
His thinking on how decisions about complex
social systems could best be made went through several phases.
As an operational researcher he pioneered the idea of
interdisciplinary teams to tackle problems in business,
government and society. As a systems guru, he was concerned with
designing appropriate feedback loops within social systems. More
recently, he worked on participative methods to enable large
groups to solve their own problems. What united these aspects of
his work was his early and consistent commitment to a holistic
approach.
Beer was born in London, where his father was
chief statistician at Lloyd's Register of Shipping. He began a
degree in philosophy and psychology at University College
London, but in 1944 left it incomplete to join the army. He saw
service as a company commander and in intelligence in India, and
stayed there until 1947, leaving the army with the rank of
captain in 1949.
He realised that OR, so successful during
wartime, also had immense possibilities in peacetime. Appointed
to a management position in a steel company, he soon persuaded
it to set up an OR group, which he headed. The group grew to
over 70 professionals, carrying out studies across United Steel.
In 1961 he left to launch SIGMA (Science in
General Management Ltd), which he ran in partnership with Roger
Eddison. This was the first substantial operational research
consultancy in the UK. Its staff numbered some 50 before Beer
left in 1966 to join the International Pub lishing Corporation
(IPC), which had been a SIGMA client. IPC was then the largest
publishing company in the world, and Beer was appointed
development director. In this role, he pushed IPC into new
technologies, many IT-based. He coined the term "data highway",
30 years before "information highway" came into vogue.
From 1970 he operated as an independent
consultant. For over two years, until Chile's President Allende
was overthrown in 1973, Beer worked on a new cybernetics-based
control system to be applied to the entire social economy of
Chile. This was to be a real-time computerised system, an
extremely ambitious project given the technology then available.
Although the Pinochet coup prevented the full
realisation of the system, Beer later undertook commissions for
the presidential offices of Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela,
answering directly to the president in the latter two. His
recognition was always greater abroad than at home, where the
British establishment was uncomfortable with his big vision and
radical orientation.
From the publication of his first book,
Cybernetics And Management (1959), a systems approach to the
management of organisations was his central concern. In this he
built on the foundations of cybernetics laid down by Norbert
Wiener, Ross Ashby, and his mentor Warren McCulloch. A series of
four books based on his Viable System Model were published
during the 1970s, of which The Brain Of The Firm is the most
celebrated.
In the 1990s he turned his attention to a
complementary approach, introduced in his 1994 book Beyond
Dispute: The Invention Of Team Syntegrity. Team Syntegrity is a
participatory method for enlisting the creativity of substantial
groups to develop solutions to shared issues. Non-hierarchical
and democratic, it has been widely adopted, with a growing
international network.
Professional recognition was indicated by Beer's
many visiting chairs, presidencies and honorary degrees,
remarkable achievements for someone with no first degree. This
distinctive lack was ended by the award to him in 2000, when he
was 73, of a higher doctorate, a DSc from the University of
Sunderland, in recognition of his published work.
His impact on the way we think about management
and systems was the result both of his magnetic personality, and
the power of his writing. His prizewinning 1966 book Decision
And Control charms the reader with its style as well as content.
In this, as in his other writing, he takes an expansive view of
his subject. His approach was always challenging, even
subversive to conventional decision-making. Radically then, and
unfashionably now, he believed in the benefits of a scientific
approach, though he railed against reductionism. Unlike other
management writers, he saw science as freeing thought and
action, not trapping it in narrow procedures and techniques. It
was his constant theme that the greatest possible autonomy of
action should be maintained at all levels of the organisation,
not just at the top.
Beer was a larger than life character. He was
tall, broad, brimful of energy, and, in later years, bearded
like an Old Testament prophet. His enthusiasm for life could be
over-powering and quite non-Anglo-Saxon. Those who encountered
him polarised between the group that was distrustful of what it
saw as his showmanship, and those who were converted into
permanent admirers. He was deeply loyal and affectionate to his
friends.
In 1974 Beer renounced material possessions and
moved from the London suburbs to live in very simple style in a
small stone cottage in the remote hills of Ceredigion,
mid-Wales. From the mid-1980s he divided his time between there
and an alternative base in Toronto, which has become a centre of
interest in his work. He published books of his poems, and his
paintings were exhibited, most notably in an apse of the Roman
Catholic cathedral in Liverpool in 1992 and 1993.
He was married twice, in 1947 to Cynthia
Hannaway and in 1968 to Sallie Steadman. He had five sons and
three daughters. His partner of 21 years, Allenna Leonard, was a
colleague in his work.
(Anthony) Stafford Beer, management systems expert, born
September 25 1926; died August 23 2002
Also see-
The World Organisation of
Systems
and Cybernetics
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