Designing Freedom
Ok so not strictly a book… I listened to the Massy lectures here. But I did it back-to-back and apparently it was transcribed into a book I take to be nearly identical.
I am wary of Beer, but I don’t want to be. I feel I’ve been here before - back in university I had a fairly sustained explore of the Permaculture work of Bill Mollison. Beer is less interested in my garden, but fear Bearded Men and their tales of systems thinking. Complexity revealed and yet made manifest into a key to unlock the understanding of the world. It’s a delicious prospect, but one I’ve felt burned on before.
But I can’t shake this. I spend 8 hours of most of my days in a working environment and I’ve become obsessed with how these places work and what they mean. Noam Chomsky once intoned the contradiction that many avowed democrats and liberal champions are intensely relaxed spending their days in intensely dictatorial regimes of corporate life. As if democracy were just for politics, and has no value in the world of money.
Our ideas matter, and come to shape the organisations we can imagine, and so the ones we build and live in. I can’t escape the feeling most organisations are built on a model that imagines something fundamentally military in its structure - a sense of hierarchy as inevitable.
Across these lectures I think Beer is trying to suggest that other ideas and analogies might lead to much more interesting ends. To take biology - it’s not really clear that the mind which writes this is properly understood as executive and CEO commanding the fingers which type?
Biological systems are clearly not anarchic; an ordered solution can be produced, but it seems to rely much less on hierarchy as core concept. Beer is interested in designing for this freedom. Some of this would seem to be freedom for those within the system - agents with a clear remit and autonomy with a defined space. Freedom to act and not merely be commanded. In my work this seems often sought after, even discussed as management best practice. How do we “enable”, “empower” staff, how can we get them to act without micromanagement, yet stay aligned with a coherent whole.
However those desires for staff to solve the organisation’s own problems then easily clash with top down commandments, consolidation of control. We want autonomous actors, until we panic and want folks to follow orders.
Beer gives an intriguing way to design for something different.
As for why, I’m reasonably convinced about his grounding the need in Ashby’s law of requisite variety.
Only variety can absorb variety.
That the number of possible states in a system is its variety, and if factors to control that variety do not exceed that number of states a surplus is inherently unregulated. That to control variety, you need variety.
In trying to think this through I’m drawn beyond the department store analogies Beer gives us, to my own bread and butter. A system not adequately tested, linted, statically analysed, dynamically stretched - where its variety is not wrapped in a greater variety of regulating checks leaves an ungoverned space.
And like Beer’s take on Ashby’s law, we know that sometimes that’s just a reality of Agile delivery. We don’t pursue 100% code coverage, because those last % points are just of less value than the other things you can do. Sometimes you leave some variety unabsorbed to focus on variety in other areas.
So if variety can only absorb variety, we will need systems of decision making that don’t merely simplify the complexity of our tasks for onwards transmission. Rather we’ll need varied systems that can absorb that complexity.
As a person who makes a living with my brain as much as my hands, Beer’s claims to design freedom appeal to me. I want a place I’ll enjoy the autonomy, mastery and purpose to act for the rest of my career.
But workplaces aren’t only for the workers, they must produce something too. Perhaps Beer’s most intriguing claim is that designing for freedom will remedy many of the pathologies of our organisations, through their failure to absorb the complexity, the variety of their domains.
After "Designing Freedom" I read: Recoding America Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better
Before "Designing Freedom" I read: Thinking in Systems: A Primer