Thinking about the VSM and the Person

[Mark Johnson]

If you don't know it, this article by Allena Leonard is useful...
http://www.allennaleonard.com/PersVSM.html

[Doug Haynes]

This has been an interesting 'kick-off' to the topic of 'VSM and the Person' --> Mark, Alex, Steve and Patrick. I want to comment on the whole debate to date.

It's hard to think of how to improve on Allenna's paper - I had read it before a long time ago, but Alex diving in with his play on 'cooking' was wonderful - its because, the way I view the VSM, the model allows exploration and diagnosis and produces insight and awareness, but needs observations to cloth the feedback homeostats which are fizzing round more like a door full of Catherine Wheels than a nice single arrow loop, particularly on a personal basis.

I do agree with Steve about the issue of technology as either amplification or attenuation. At the time Stafford wrote this, he was accustomed to 6 inch thick financial reports from mainframe computers which never got looked at because there was no attempt at attenuation in the design and this was the stage where managers were crying out for exception reports as helpful attenuation. Now the internet with search engines and user-influenced Wikipedia information attenuates most knowledge into a need-to-know amplification activity.

I'm interested in the use of the law of requisite variety (LRV) in balancing some of our own personal evaluations when modelling with the VSM. Mark and Patrick both make some great comments in response to Alex's penetrating questions. Two quick observations on this. For many years, I've been asking a particular question at conferences of Professors of Information Management about how they manage their own tendancies for information overload. In response, they rarely have the language of requisite variety and the answers have sometimes seemed like verbal diarrhoea. However, I predicably wrote this question at a huge executive management day conference at the manchester GMex Centre at which Michael Porter and Gary Hemmel were the keynote speakers and Gary Hemel selected my question and jumped into and out of my question for the rest of the afternoon, (and never got round to any other questions!). However, his answer was pretty good, because he had a good grasp of requisite variety which he repeatedly linked to identity - so to massive paraphrase his answer, he was saying your identity gives you the apparatus to gauge and handle the requisite variety continuously in relation to the personal and business environments you are working within. This of course needs unpacking - not space here.

However, Roger Harnden and Allenna Leonard wrote a really punchy article about 'putting the T into TQM' in which they unpack what 'Total' might mean for the individual - a calculus of distinctions (Spencer Brown) and homing in to a key area of 'individual responsibility'. The outcome is a comment on how personal excellence may be achieved,s and reference Pirsig's (1974) 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' where the main character fails to establish a context for the making of coherent distinctions that led to the dominance of insanity, suffering and disorientation permeating his work. However, I think with the VSM, we can neatly sidestep these difficult issues because the framework neatly cuts out some of the variety of higher recursions and 'viability' gives scope to evolve an almost personal pragmatism that 'works' or 'balances' rather than 'optimises'.

I think this is enough from me - I'm fascinated by how we might encapsulate creativity within a personal VSM frtamework and I've lots of ideas on it, but for another time! Doug

[Mark Johnson]

This is a video which I made for a recent Critical Realism conference on Personal Coordination and Social Emancipation (for which read 'VSM')... any comments?