SATM 4.7 Control Engineering and Cybernetics

The Greek word kybernetes, meaning the art of steersmanship, was employed by Plato to refer both to the piloting of a vessel and to the steering of the "ship of state." From the Greek kybernetes came the Latin gubernator, and hence the English governor.

Cybernetics is not itself a discipline. Rather it is a transdiscipline, signaled the emergence of systems thinking in its own right. 

During World War II scientists from different disciplines - physicists, electrical engineers, mathematicians, physiologists, etc. - were brought together to work on military problems. An interdisciplinary ferment was created and one group of scientists became aware of the essential unity of a set of problems surrounding communication and control whether in machones or biological entities. Norbert Wiener was at the center of this group, which also included J.H. Bigelow who had worked with Wiener during the war on improving the accuracy of anti-aircraft guns, and A. Rosenblueth, a medical scientist and a colleague of W,B, Cannon.

Wiener first used the name cybernetics for a specific field of study in 1947. In 1948 his book Cybernetics was published, Wiener himself (1950, The Use of Human Beings, Eyrs and Spottiswoode, London.) applied the insights of cybernetics to human concerns. Cybernetics was to be true interdisciplinary science, it dealt with general laws that governed control processes. The two key concepts elucidated by Wiener at this time were control and communication. The theory of control can be seen as part of the theory of messages. Control involves the communication of information.

W. Ross Ashby, who published his most famous book, An Introduction to Cybernetics, in 1956. As well as being a popularizing text it introduced the important notion of "variety" and the well-known "law of requisite variety." Ashby noted how it should reveal numerous interesting and suggestive parallels between machine, brain and society. In 1959 Stafford Beer published Cybernetics and Management and then, in 1961, J.W. Forrester's Industrial Dynamics appeared.

Beer (1959, Cybernetics and Management, EUP, Oxford.)was the first to apply cybernetics to management in any comprehensive fashion, defining management as the science and profession of control. He also offered a new definition of cybernetics as the :science of effective organization" (Beer, 1979, The Heart of Enterprise, Wiley, Chichester.) His model of any viable system, the VSM, was developed. This could be used to diagnose the faults in any existing organizational system or to design new systems along sound cybernetics lines.

Forrester (1961, Industrial Dynamics, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 1969, Principles of Systems, Wright-Allan Press, Cambridge, MA) invented system dynamics, which held out the promise that the behavior of whole systems could be represented and understood through modeling the dynamics feedback processes going on within them. Using system dynamics models, decision makers can experiment with possible changes to variables to see what effect this has on overall system behavior.

According to Beer (1959), systems which are worthy of being suitable subjects of concern for cybernetics are likely to demonstrate the characteristics of extreme complexity, self-regulation and probabilism. Cybernetics provides a way of analyzing each of these characteristics and tools to enable managers to cope. 

Simplifying considerably, extreme complexity can be deal with using the black box technique, self-regulation can be appropriately managed using negative feedback and probabilism yield to the method of variety engineering (Schoderbek, Schoderbek and Kefalas, 1985, Management Systems: Conceptual Considerations. 3rd ed., Business Publication, Dallas.)

(Jackson, 2000, Systems Approaches to Management, Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, NY. P67~69)