Communication And Control

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The second metaphor used by Morgan in his book Images of Organisation is biological: ‘the organisation as an organism or system’. [15]  The area of common ground in systems thinking between biology and management is the concept of an open system. In contrast to the machine bureaucracy, where the organisation is shielded from disturbances in its environment, the boundaries of organisations that behave like organisms are permeable, allowing a relatively free exchange of information, thereby permitting the systemic, ‘joined up’ environment advocated in the Lyons Review 2004 [4] and the subsequent Varney Review 2006. [19]

Communication is about conveying information.  Similar to energy bonds in a physical structure, information flows hold the organisation together and define its identity.  Lateral flows co-ordinate the various parts of the organisation, providing cohesion and integrity; whilst information filters and discontinuities limit, delay or block communication, shaping the internal structure of the organisation and determining its overall boundaries.  Vertical flows in the form of instructions or constraints from higher levels are balanced by feedback from the lower levels in the form of limitations or alternative goals; if there are too many constraints on the lower subsystems, the structure of the organisation can become rigid and lack requisite variety to deal with external change; but if the goals are not sufficiently clear there is a risk that the system might drift and lose direction.  [17]

The Viable System Model (VSM) is a management model for organisations that borrows from the patterns of information flows and control systems found in living systems.  [14]  The VSM’s answer to the centralisation / decentralisation dilemma is a ‘recursive’ structure, where its five functions of policy, market intelligence, supervisory control, co-ordination and implementation are distributed at all structural levels like a series of Chinese boxes.  The role of management systems within the VSM is at the level of ‘co-ordination’, which acts as the interface between higher management functions and the operations of the primary sub-units.  Note from the drawing opposite that effective use of this lateral channel minimises use of the vertical control channel to upper management levels.

The VSM has been used successfully as a tool for diagnosis and redesigning organisational structure in many public and private sector organisations.  A drawback of the model is that it is considerably more sophisticated than the usual charts of organisational structures.  However, its main advantage derives from its recursive design - devolving primary activities whilst providing them with support from regulatory and communication functions.  Due to this design, the VSM offers a credible alternative to the classic top-down command structure or the blunt, cost-cutting exercises of business process engineering.

The metaphor of ‘the organisation as an organism or system’ includes not only hard, technical systems but also softer, human activity systems, resulting in a ‘socio-technical system’ - people process and place - as shown on page 4.  When human behaviour is taken into account, the predictability of the machine model vanishes and the need to understand informal structures, processes and organisational culture becomes a key factor in the design of a business management system.

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