How Organizational Cybernetics Can Help to Organize Debates on Complex Issues

How Organizational Cybernetics Can Help to Organize Debates on Complex Issues Pérez Ríos J 1, Velasco Jiménez I 2, Sánchez Mayoral P 3 Abstract In this paper we expose how concepts taken from the Systems Thinking field, and in particular Organizational Cybernetics (OC), can help decision makers to study complex issues with the help of the information and communication technologies (ICT). We present some software tools developed within the Systems Thinking and Organizational Cybernetics Research Group (STOCRG) of the University of Valladolid that based on OC concepts use ICTs to help groups of people to study complex issues in a collaborative way through Internet. We discuss some uses of OC to help collective decisions making and we show two international pioneering experiences in which the ICTs have been used in combination with OC concepts. In the first case the purpose was to create a collective scientific book by a group of scientists working at distance and, in the second case, to organize a major academic international event. We end the paper showing an example of specific software (Debates Organizer) developed in the STOCRG through the last 15 years to facilitate any size of groups of people through Internet the organization of debates on complex issues. Keywords: Organizational Cybernetics, Team Syntegrity, Debates Organizer 1 José Pérez Ríos ( e-mail: rios@uva.es) Grupo INSISOC. Dpto. de Organización de Empresas y CIM. Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Informática. Universidad de Valladolid. Campus Miguel Delibes S/N, 47011 Valladolid. 2 Iván Velasco Jiménez e-mail: ivan.velasco@uva.es Grupo INSISOC. Dpto. de Organización de Empresas y CIM. Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Informática. Universidad de Valladolid. Campus Miguel Delibes S/N, 47011 Valladolid. 3 Pablo Sánchez Mayoral e-mail: mayoral@uva.es Grupo INSISOC. Dpto. de Organización de Empresas y CIM. Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Informática. Universidad de Valladolid. Campus Miguel Delibes S/N, 47011 Valladolid. * This work has been supported in part by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Plan Nacional de I+D+i) of Spain. Ref.: CSO2010-15745. 803

1 Introduction In the last few decades the world has changed dramatically. Many are the interrelated factors involved in that change (socio-economic crisis, globalization, demographic, etc.). The consequence is that we live in a very complex social system. To qualify the level of complexity of a system (or a situation) Ashby (1956) proposed the concept of variety (number of possible states of a system) and set in his Law of Requisite Variety that only variety can destroy variety. At the start of the seventies, Conant and Ashby (1970) had argued, in the famous theorem that bears their name, that a good regulator of a system must be a model of the system and that the variety of the regulator must be at least equal to the variety of the system that it pretends to regulate. If we think in the role of managers of organizations as governors of them then they need models adequate to the task, that means models with requisite variety. The Systems Thinking field and in particular Organizational Cybernetics (OC) provide some models like the Viable System Model (VSM) and tools like Team Syntegrity (TS) 4 that can help decision takers to tackle the complex problems facing them. If we focus our attention in how to facilitate the decision-making and communication processes we should consider that, as Pérez Ríos (2008, 2012) expressed it: The new frontier of humanity is, at the start of the XXIst century, not so much scientific or technological development as an understanding of the complex social systems in which we are immersed. Such understanding is fundamental for our being able to deal effectively with the problems of social tension facing mankind. We must explore new ways to organize and engage in relations that will enhance the processes of communication and decision-making certain fundamental challenges which still have not been resolved in a satisfactory way: for example, the development of group-decision processes which are at the same time democratic, creative and efficient, or the replacement of hierarchical organizational structures by other more democratic ones in which all points of view can be effectively taken into consideration. (Pérez Ríos 2012, pp. 201-202). But, at the same time that the world changed and experienced an increase in its dynamic complexity, a whole new set of technological tools related to information and communication technologies (ICT) became available. Also the interest about the role that these can play as a support to higher levels of people participation in discussions and decision-making kept increasing. Examples of those technologies can be found in what is generally known as groupware, which includes software for planning and programming in groups, computer-assisted cooperative undertakings, and the whole arsenal of tools that have appeared within the so-called Web 2.0 (Almuiña, Perez Rios et al., 2008, pp. 253-265). The conjunction of these two 4 Team Syntegrity and Syntegration are registered trademarks by Team Syntegrity Internacional Inc. and Malik Management Zentrum St. Gallen. 804

cornerstones namely, on the one hand, the new conceptual framework for the design of organisational structures and decision processes, and, on the other, the availability of a technological support allowing remote collective intercommunication opens up new horizons for relations between individuals and institutions. (Pérez Ríos 2012, pp. 202). In this paper we focus our attention on the application of concepts taken from the Systems Thinking field and in particular Organizational Cybernetics (Beer 1979, 1981, 1985; Pérez Ríos 2012) to help decision makers to study complex issues with the help of the information and communication technologies. In it we present some software tools developed within the Systems Thinking and Organizational Cybernetics Research Group (STOCRG- INSISOC) of the University of Valladolid (UVA) that based on OC concepts use ICTs to help groups of people to study complex issues in a collaborative way through Internet. The paper is structure as follows. First we make reference to how OC has been applied to help collective decisions making. Next we show two international pioneering experiences in which ICTs have been used in combination with OC concepts. The first case purpose was to create a collective scientific book by a group of scientists working at distance and, in the second case, to organize a major academic international event. In the last part of this paper we show an example of specific software developed in the STOCRG through the last 15 years with the aim of helping any size of groups of people to organize debates on complex issues through Internet. 2 Organizational Cybernetics and Group Decision Making Among the diversity of conceptual tools that OC can provide to help collective decision-making we will focus our attention on Team Syntegrity 5 due to its value to facilitate those decision processes. Team Syntegrity consists basically of a methodology developed by Stafford Beer (1994) with the aim of offering a creative, synergetic and participative platform for studying complex problems which we might regard as a structured means of creating and communicating a group awareness (Pérez Ríos 2012, pp.203). The goals of the TS application can be summarized as follows: 1) To generate a high level of participation among the individuals concerned 2) To provide a structure and a system of communication that guarantee the non-hierarchical nature of the process 3) To benefit from the variety and wealth of knowledge supplied by each individual within the group, putting into practice the synergies derived from the interaction among all its members 4) To create a collective 5 A detailed description of the Team Syntegrity protocols can be found in Pérez Ríos (2000, 2008) and in chapter five of the book: Pérez Ríos (2012) Design and Diagnosis for Sustainable Organizations. The Viable System Method, Springer. 805

awareness, if possible shared among all the members of the group, regarding the central issue being considered and analysed (Pérez Ríos 2012, pp.205). The main phases in which is structured the process of application of TS are the following: a) Opening question. The TS application process starts when a question is asked concerning the issue to be studied or discussed. This question is normally (though not necessarily) of a general, open nature; b) Explosion of variety (Statements). In this stage, each participant prepares statements he/she considers relevant to the central question. The only requirements regarding these statements are that they can be refuted and are not very extensive; c) Reduction of Variety and grouping. After issuing and grouping the statements, we go on to generate Aggregated Statements; d) Assigning topics to people. When the topics for discussion have been identified, it is necessary to determine which persons among the group are going to take part in the debate on each of them. We need therefore to find out their preferences. Once these preferences have been ascertained, this information is processed with the aid of a computerised assignment algorithm 6, which tries to maximise the degree of satisfaction in the group; e) Generation of content. In this phase the different teams which debate each of the main topics generates the information that clarifies the topic. In the next section we will see some examples of how TS was used to help two different groups of people to work collaboratively through Internet. 3 Communication and Information Technologies and Group Decision-Making: Two cases The fast development and diffusion of ICTs opened new ways to apply elements of the OC to help people to debate complex issues without having to be necessarily in the same place. Two pioneering examples of this are the Stafford Beer Festschrift Project (SBFP) and the Horizonte 2000 Project. The Stafford Beer Festschrift Project (SBFP) is the first application in the world of TS, using ICTs. The purpose of the project was to set up a collective study in which over 30 cyberneticians (among them J. Pérez Ríos, co-author of this paper) from four continents and sixteen countries could create a scientific work, revealing the usefulness of S. Beer s different theories for all kinds of organisations and for society in general. This work would be presented to Beer to celebrate his 70 th birthday. The presentation in fact occurred on September 25 th 1996, at John Moore s University in Liverpool. The undertaking was carried out between October 1995 and July 1996. Almost all of the work, consisting of both identifying the chapters it would include (12) and drawing up the content (more 6 The Systems Thinking and Organizational Cybernetics Research Group at the University of Valladolid developed a set of optimizing algorithms for various TS configurations. 806

than 600 pages), was done remotely via Internet. This scientific work has been published under the title: To be and not to be that is the system: A tribute to Stafford Beer, CD ROM (Espejo, Schwaninger et al., 1997). In the book Intelligent Organizations, M. Schwaninger, co-director of the project writes about the elaboration process (Schwaninger, 2006, pp. 123-128). The second example is the Horizonte 2000 Project. The aim of this project was to promote the cooperation among the universities from Iberoamérica, Filipinas and those of Spanish influence in the U.S.A. The project was presented in the event named "I Encuentro de Rectores de Universidades Hispano-Americano- Filipinas" which, organized by the University of Valladolid, took place in Valladolid (Spain) on 23-27 march 1998. Its purpose was expressed as: To identify and to start new ways of relationships among the various Spanish speaking universities. It intends, from 1998 on, to open a new historical period of relationships based upon the equality, democracy and mutual trust. To make it possible and to foster this process the new information and communication technologies will be used. (Almuiña, Pérez Ríos et al, 2000, pp.14-15). The debates system created to make this possible was based on OC principles and it used a new software tool created for this event (Iberforo-98 Project). We will comment some details of this tool in the next section. 4 Group Decision-Making Software Tools. Debates Organizer Based on OC principles and in some elements of the first phases of the TS approach we initiated in 1997 within the ST and OC Research Group of the UVA the development of two groups of software tools to support several phases of the process of knowledge capturing and organization of debates. The first group included software tools that helped the application of TS protocols. The second group included software tools oriented to facilitate the collective knowledge capturing and study of complex issues, as well as the realization of debates through Internet. These set of tools were presented in the Fourth Metaphorum Conference in Liverpool in 2006 (Pérez Ríos, 2006). The first group of tools (based in TS) includes: 1) Software to configure and organize groups sessions in different size options (number of persons: 30, 24, 28, 12, 6); 2) Software to optimize (maximize participants satisfaction) the assignments (persons to issues) in the physically organized sessions; 3) Software to facilitate through Internet the visualization in 3D of the various TS configurations (view of Topics and Participants, as vertex and struts respectively, in figures corresponding to various groups sizes/configurations as represented by the icosahedron-30, octahedron-12, tetrahedron-6, etc.). The second group of tools was oriented to help decision makers to study complex issue through Internet. Here we include two different software applications. 807

The first of them (Col-KCap) was created to help the members of a group to generate through Internet a causal map of the complex problem object of study (Pérez Ríos 1999). It allowed the incorporation of all kind of information both to the variables and to the relations between them, as well as the realization of a MIMAC study (cross-impact analysis) and classification of variables in four main groups (active, passive, critical and inert). The second set of software application (Debates Organizer) was oriented to facilitate the organization of debates of complex issues to any number of persons through Internet (www.debatesorganizer.org). The advantage of using this Internet modality of debates versus the physical meetings (i.e.: the meetings organized with TS, as mentioned in the previous paragraph) is that the persons who compose the group can be located anywhere in space and can intervene at the time that best fits their needs or availability. Another advantage is that a person is not limited to belong only to two specific teams (Topics), as happens in the physical applications of the TS (the two vertex connected by a strut). A person can participate virtually in as many Teams/Topics as she/he likes. Of course there are practical limitations about its number (time availability etc.). The first version of this software was used in the above-mentioned Project Horizonte 2000 (Pérez Ríos 1998, 2000) to organize the I Encuentro de Rectores de Universidades Hispano-Americano-Filipinas mentioned in the Section 3 (See Almuiña, Pérez Ríos et al. 2000). This project financed in part by the BSCH, was the precursor of the Universia project created in 2000 by the BSCH. The information and communication based software tools used in this project constituted the Iberforo-98 project, later called Iberfora-2000. One of its components was the software to facilitate the organization of debates whose functioning we describe below. The initial version of this software which was used by the rectors who participated in the I Encuentro de Rectores included these three main phases of the Internet based debate: a) Formulation of the Issue to be studied b) Expansion of Variety and c) Reduction of Variety and Aggregation of Ideas. An advanced version of this software was presented in the Metaphorum Conference in Liverpool (Pérez Ríos, 2006). Since then we have been using it continuously in our teaching activity in the UVA with engineering students (Information Science, Telecommunications etc.). Let us see briefly how it works. The application of the Debates Organizer to study of a complex issue follows the steps that we describe next. The organization of a debate starts with the identification of the people who is going to intervene in the process (can be located anywhere because their activity will be done through Internet) and the configuration of the debate. In Figure 1 (screenshots from the software Debates Organizer) we can see some of the menu options for the administrator to configure the application. Once created the debate the first step is the launching of the question that expresses the issue to be clarified/answered. This question is presented to the group as a debate kick-off in the form of a manifesto to the group. For example in the 808

case of the "I Encuentro de Rectores de Universidades Hispano-Americano- Filipinas" the question was: How to organize (now and in future) the relationships between the various Universities Hispano-Americano-Filipinas, based on a common language and culture, in order to get the maximum benefit for our societies? Another example is the issue/question proposed to students of Information Science Engineering: What do you think are the effects of the current financial crisis for society and what role ICTs can play in this new scenario? Once known the question the members of the group have a period of time to generate the statements/ideas that each of them considers it relates to answering the issue/question proposed (Figure 2). Fig. 1 Debates Organizer main screens (Administrator and Users options) Fig. 2 Debates Organizer (List of Statements/ Ideas) 809

In the next step the members of the group propose the aggregation of statements (see Figure 3). The purpose of this phase is to consolidate related ideas into a more elaborated Aggregated Statement. Each of the Aggregated Statement finally agreed would constitute the Final topics which condense the answer of the group to the question/issue under study. This process (generation of ideas, aggregation and final consolidation) is enriched with the comments (visible to the group) to all ideas made by the group members through time. The final step is the Generation of Content for each of the Final Topics. This is done typically in physical meetings but some research is in process about its realization at least partially with the help of Internet. Fig. 3 Debates Organizer (Example of Comment to a Statement and List of Aggregated Statements) Fig. 4 Debates Organizer (Example of Aggregated Statements) 810

5 Conclusions In this paper we presented some examples of applications of OC concepts and tools to help managers to study complex issues in a collaborative way. We commented two international projects (SBFP and Horizonte 2000) in which these have been applied in combination with ICT tools. We exposed as well several software developments done at the STOC research group with the aim of facilitating the organization of debate sessions through Internet. We provide also some information about how one of those -the debates organizer software- works. This application can be used not only to help managers of private companies to make group decisions but to all kind of organizations, no matter if they are public, private, big or small, for profit or non-profit etc. In fact one of our current lines of research is to explore how evolved version of this tools can provide support to a more collaborative and efficient citizens participation in public affairs. 7 References Almuiña C, Martín R. y Pérez Ríos J (eds.) (2000) Las Universidades iberoamericanas en la sociedad del conocimiento. Universidad de Valladolid. Valladolid, ISBN: 84-8448-03-3. Almuiña C, Pérez Ríos J et al. (2008) La relevancia de los medios de comunicación en Castilla y León. Consejo Económico y Social de Castilla y León. ISBN: 978-84-95308-37-5. Ashby WR (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics,Vol. 2, Chapman Hall, London. Beer S (1979) The Heart of Enterprise. Wiley. Chichester. Beer S (1981) Brain of the Firm, 2nd edn. Wiley. Chichester. Beer S (1985) Diagnosing the System for Organizations. Wiley. Chichester. Beer S (1994) Beyond Dispute. The Invention of Team Syntegrity. Wiley. Chichester. Conant RC and Ashby WR (1970) Every good regulator of a system must be model of that system, Int. J. Systems Science, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 89-97. Espejo R, Schwaninger M et al. (1997) To be and not to be that is the system: A tribute to Stafford Beer. CD ROM, Wiesbaden; Carl Auer-Systeme Verlag. Pérez Ríos J (1998) La sintegración en equipos y el aprendizaje en las organizaciones. El caso de IBERFORO-98. Key note speech. I Reunión de Rectores de Universidades Hispano- Americanas-Filipinas. Marzo 1998, Valladolid, Spain. Pérez Ríos, J. (1999) MODELADO INTEGRADO DE SISTEMAS: Combinación de metodologías cualitativas y cuantitativas para el estudio de sistemas dinámicos. III Jornadas de Ingeniería de Organización, Barcelona. ISBN: 84-95355-00-0 Pérez Ríos J (2000) Nuevas formas organizativas en sociedades complejas. In Almuiña C, Martín R, Pérez Ríos J (eds.). Las Universidades Iberoamericanas en la sociedad del conocimiento. Universidad de Valladolid: Valladolid, Spain; 291 317. Pérez Ríos, J. (2006) Information and Communication Technologies And Organizational Cybernetics. The Fourth Metaphorum Conference. Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, U.K., MAY, 4th-5th, 2006 Pérez Ríos J (2008) Diseño y diagnóstico de organizaciones viables. Un enfoque sistémico. IBERFORA 20000. ISBN: 978-84-612-5845-1. Pérez Ríos J (2012) Design and diagnosis for sustainable organizations: The viable system method. Springer: Heidelberg, London, New York, NY. 811

Schwaninger M (2006) Intelligent Organizations. Powerful Models for Systemic Management. Springer Berlin: Heidelberg. 812