Summary and conclusions

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The job of managing buildings and facilities is complicated, requiring expert skills and knowledge.  Buildings themselves are also complicated; they are assembled from thousands of components using sophisticated construction techniques.  Nevertheless, whilst buildings are not simple, they are knowable: each component and junction can be specified and represented in a working drawing.  Similarly, the task of caring for the building during its operational life is a process that is well understood.  But when people and other business resources are integrated with property management, there are too many variables and interactions for such a situation to be fully understood or for the behaviour of the whole system to be predicted with any certainty - the situation moves from being complicated to complex.  

The underlying challenge in creating a specification for managing property assets as an integrated business resource, and a key theme of this paper, is the issue of managing complex systems.  This paper has described the conventional response to this challenge, which is the use of formal methods - breaking the system down into separate parts and re-assembling the parts into an orderly, linear process where one step follows logically from the next.  However, according to one of the main concepts introduced in this paper, formal methods are likely to fail in the context of complex systems because they lack requisite variety.  The direct transfer of formal methods used for complicated processes, as found in engineering or manufacturing, to a complex activity such as asset management has no theoretical basis.

Whole systems thinking - introduced in Green Paper A1 - offers an alternative approach to formal, mechanistic methods.  A whole systems approach to management control is focused on obtaining a desired outcome, and the primary source of control (as defined in this paper) in an organistion composed of people is in creating an environment where people will naturally behave in such a way as to achieve the goals of the system - refer inset.  Moving from the command-and-control model described in this paper, the question is not: ‘How well am I managing this system?’ but rather: ‘How well is this system allowing me to manage?’  Traditional, formal methods of management are fundamentally about exerting control over people and processes, whereas a whole systems approach substitutes direct control for the ability to influence planned outcomes through people and processes - acting on the system as a whole.

Whilst there is common agreement that formal approaches cannot deal with the full complexity of tasks such as asset management, command-and-control methods and their associated bureaucratic structures are familiar; we know how they look.  Therefore the problem is how might we control matters if we move away from these models?   The diagram and text on the opposite page describe an alternative management framework known as the Viable System Model.  This model will be explained in more detail in the next consultation paper, which will provide the outline of an industry specification for managing property assets.  Although individual organisations will need to develop bespoke, private systems for their own use - Green Paper A3 will argue that the Viable System Model is ideally suited as a holistic framework for guiding this task.

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