In a recent paper, to be published later this year, I Illustrate
supported by Beer’s Viable System Model and four vignettes, the relevance of
self-organisation, recursive structures, self-reference and reflexivity in policy
processes. For me these are concepts to ground policy processes in good
cybernetics. The four vignettes illustrate the cybernetics underpinning 'real-world' policy failures. Through this post I want to involve you, the reader, in the development of our understanding of the cybernetics of policy processes. I propose we try together discussing aspect of self-organisation, recursive structures, self-reference and reflexivity in policy processes. I suggest that Beer’s recursive
structures and second-order cybernetics have much to contribute to their
understanding and betterment.
Policy processes such as development of clean energy, local child care,
transparent marketing, economic development and so forth bring together multiple social and
economic agents in the creation, regulation and production of these
policies and through their interactions, mostly by self-organisation, they
may produce organisational systems.
Self-organisation
brings together social agents as they find common purposes and recognise the
need to interact. But chance interactions may take too long to form policies and
some form of guidance, such as political leadership, incentives for particular relations,
resources allocation, applications of disruptive technologies and others may help
in these processes. These are catalysts of organisational
systems (Espejo and Reyes, 2011).
However, it is common for agents to have a poor appreciation of the resources
and interactions that are necessary to make particular policies viable, leading
to painful shortcomings for people and society. Beer’s Viable System Model
offers a heuristic to construct policies through effective
communications. This model highlights requirements to enable the emergence of
organisational systems from fragmented resources. Among these requirements are
organisational closure, structural cohesion, value co-creation, structural recursion
of autonomous units within autonomous units and others. These are requirements
for a good cybernetics of policy processes.
In the paper I illustrate these
requirements through four vignettes; child services in England, a small
company's marketing activities in the English Midlands, alternative energy technologies
and global financial services. The child services’ vignette illustrates weak
communications between national regulators, local policy implementers and
stakeholders. This is an instance of inadequate relational self-organisation. The marketing vignette is an instance
of a company that fails developing value co-creation with customers, with the
consequence that customers impose their requirements and the company fails to
create products of its own design. This is an instance of weak relational reflexivity. The third vignette is an instance of a weak identity
of the energy sector as it fails to integrate under the same policy framework
energy technology development and energy production. This is a case of a fuzzy self-reference as necessary relations between actors focused on the
“outside and then” and on the “inside and now” fail to be
developed. The last vignette relates to the 2008 financial crisis. This is an
instance of a market driven self-organisation
process that failed to recognise that financial services had to go hand in
hand with the recursive structure of
the economy from the global to the
local. These are all instances of situations driven by poor cybernetics.I would be delighted to hear your reflections about particular policy processes that illustrate problems with organisational closure, structural recursion, structural couplings and so forth. What can we say about improving the cybernetics of policy processes.
