Balancing Present and Future: A Viable Organisation
How can organisations effectively balance the needs of the present with preparing for the future?
The Viability Challenge: Balancing Present and Future, Inside and Outside. For any organisation to be viable over the long term, it must strike a careful balance. It needs to meet the demands and realities of the present while also adapting and evolving for the future. It must optimise internal operations while responding to the external environment. Stafford Beer, a pioneer in management cybernetics, emphasised that for systems to be viable, they must be "self-organising, self-regulating, and capable of adapting to ensure long-term sustainability and effectiveness."
Maintaining this balance is challenging. Organisations face constant tension between the urgent pressures of today and the essential preparations for tomorrow. They must align and coordinate their internal parts while navigating an increasingly complex and turbulent outside world. The Viable Systems Model (VSM) provides a robust framework for understanding and managing these tensions.
“Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than static ‘snapshots.’”
One common pitfall is becoming overly focused on current operations and efficiencies at the expense of future development. Organisations stuck in a bean-counter mentality see the future as an extension of the past. They prioritise cost-cutting over innovation and expansion into new areas. While this may boost the bottom line in the short term, it sacrifices the ability to meet future challenges.
The flip side is falling into the trap of neglecting current operational realities in pursuit of grand visions and shiny new opportunities. Management attention gets focused externally, while internal performance suffers from a lack of resources and oversight. The organisation must be able to deliver in the present to earn the right to chase future possibilities.
Balancing inside and outside perspectives is equally crucial. Becoming too internally focused leads to dangerous blindspots about shifts in the external competitive landscape, where organisations face unexpected problems because they lack essential information about their environment and potential risks that catch them unprepared. On the other hand, reacting to every environmental change without sufficient grounding in internal capabilities causes organisations to lurch from one direction to another, leading to ineffective changes and resource wastage.
Beer's VSM emphasises the critical need to integrate these perspectives through reciprocal information and control flows. Strong "vertical" connections are required between the units handling current operations (Operations, coordination, performance and resourcing) and the higher-level management responsible for future adaptation (Intelligence, Governance and Identity). Just as important are robust "horizontal" coordination mechanisms across operational units to ensure cohesive performance.
Organisations become fragmented and unstable when these feedback loops and conversations break down. Operational units become disconnected, while senior management retreats to an unhealthy bunker mentality, especially when crises hit. The organisation gets torn between conflicting objectives, with some parts moving too slowly and others changing too erratically.
“You gotta challenge all assumptions. If you don’t, what is doctrine on day one becomes dogma forever after. ”
Overcoming these challenges requires constant management of organisational boundaries and interfaces. Key integration points between levels and across units must be consciously designed and actively maintained. When done well, the organisation develops responsive cohesion, optimising the parts in service of the greater whole.
This is the essence of Beer's concept of viability. It's not just about the organisation's survival but its ability to maintain its identity and purpose as it continuously evolves. Viable organisations find dynamic equilibrium between inside and out, top and bottom, centralisation and autonomy. They use real-time feedback to sense and respond to emerging changes.
Building this sort of organisational viability doesn't happen by accident or default. The natural tendency is to drift to one extreme or the other - bogged down in present operations or lost in futuristic fantasies, fragmented into warring fiefdoms or rigidly centralised for control.
It takes active, ongoing design and management to keep the organisation poised on the edge between order and chaos where adaptability lives.
“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”
As Beer makes clear, the alternative to viability is a slow or sudden death. If the environment changes faster than the organisation can integrate those changes, it will fail. The only question is how long it takes. By contrast, the self-organising, self-regulating viable organisation uses its internal variety to match and absorb external variety. It continuously senses and responds at the pace the world demands.
Achieving organisational viability is a never-ending balancing act. But equipped with frameworks like Beer's VSM, leaders can more consciously navigate the tensions inherent in long-term success. They can design structures and processes that integrate today's realities and tomorrow's requirements. The viable organisation earns its ongoing right to exist by finding dynamic equilibrium - inside and out, present and future.
How well is your organisation balancing the optimisation of current operations with adaptation for the future?
