Beer Beer we want more Beer

I remember the moment when I knew I’d passed my Ph.D. It wasn’t a joyous moment; just shear relief and unworthiness.  It had been a journey of many dodgy paths, some deep and dark, others of complete frustration and hopelessness. Maybe this was slightly predictable. My thesis included mathematical modelling, oxygen uptake kinetics and statistics that I had to defend. Although mathematical theories are based on logic, my brain seems to be find them quite unfathomable and completely illogical. I like large concepts, seeing the big picture and taking time to muse over philosophical principles….not reductionism and looking at minutia.

I have often thought my examiners passed me because they didn’t have the balls to fail me! However, I’m now beginning to feel more worthy. That’s because I now understand that the journey taught me how to learn, to question things that do not seem to make sense and to realise that fact is as impermanent as life itself.
I love learning, looking to solve complex problems through emergentism (the antonym of reductionism) and distrust those who follow conventional paths without taking the time to understand what is beneath their feet. Instantaneously on seeing a YouTube video of a man called Stafford Beer, I trusted him as someone who was wise. This now departed man was talking about cybernetics, the science of effective organisation. I immediately warmed to him in a way that a disciple warmed to Jesus. In fact Prof. Beer had a god like appearance, old, a big bushy white beard, a smile and calmness that engendered trust. He was a true multi-disciplinarian, brining knowledge from philosophy, biology, physics, maths, economics, politics …….. together in a way that only a true genius could.
I have now bought a few books by Prof. Beer, Designing Freedom being one of them. It was published in 1974 but his words could have been written yesterday……as they are so contemporary.
To paraphrase “the evidence that the apparatus for civilisation is beginning to fail. I instance the decay of previously rich and healthy cities beginning to decay……stark inequalities…..pollution on a worldwide scale. There is a widening chasm between luxury and starvation, whereby we somehow manage to concentrate more wealth with the already wealthy and more deprivation with the already deprived”.  

This all sounds quite fatalistic but it’s not because Prof. Beer has the genius to offer solutions based on ‘simple’ but mathematically provable theories. He also suggests when a system begins to work, we feel the need to change it before it fully equilibrates thus creating flux and instability. He also argues that because time is an infinite concept……placing constraints such as weeks, months or years on organisational structures results in instability. If you understand anything about 4 year plans in government departments, then you’ll grasp this concept very quickly. Beer understood how to build relatively stable organisational systems but 40 years down the line his lessons still fall on deaf ears.  Maybe in 300 years they will have become conventional wisdom. I hope so because we won’t have a world if we follow current societal norms.