Sustainable Self-Governance in Businesses and Society: The Viable System Model in Action (Systems Thinking)

Sustainable Self-Governance in Businesses and Society offers a sound introduction to Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) and clarifies its relevance to support organisational sustainability and self-governance.While the VSM has been known since the early 1980s, it hasn’t been always easy to understand and to apply.It explains the self-transformation methodology to analyse the way organisations manage (or not) their complexity and govern themselves.The work is supported by multiple examples of application in organisations of all scales - from small to multi-national corporations and from organised social networks to communities and national organisations.It clarifies the relevance of Beer’s theory to support systemic learning and change in organisations, and to coach them to self-organise and self-govern.Readers interested in further understanding insights from complex systems and cybernetics theories for designing and transforming organisations will benefit from this book, as it