A System Is Designed to Do Exactly What It Does, Or...

A constructivist’s view of POSIWID

T he dictum, “purpose of a system is what it does” (POSWID) is famous in cybernetics, attributed to the management cybernetician Stafford Beer.

Beer notes: “A good observer will impute the purpose of the system from its actions and thus from the resultant state.”

Hence the key aphorism and acronym. There is, after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it consistently fails to do. I’ve written about this before here and here. In cybernetics, the emphasis is on what a “system” does, and not especially on what it is or what the designer or management of the “system” claims it’s doing. Thus, we can see that POSIWID has a special place in every cybernetician’s mind.

A “system” is a collection of variables that observers purposefully select to make sense of the world around them. The boundaries and parts of the system vary according to who is doing the observing. The purpose also is assigned by the observer.

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Comments

Reference of quotes should be provided

Hi Harish,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts about systems and their purpose as well as Beer's view of this matter.

However, I think it could be prudent to share references to the sources of the Beer's quotes that you used in your post.

Regards,

Alexander Solodkin

Reference

Good suggestion. The source is The Heart of Enterprise. I will add that to the source post.

Nice to see this!

Back in the '90s, there was a discussion group (a listserv) called the Deming Electronic Network. Illuminaries in the world of Quailty held regular discussions there on various aspects of the System of Profound Knowledge, Deming's 14 points and 7 deadly diseases, and other related subjects. People like Myron Tribus, Heero Hacqueboord, Michael Tviete, David Kerridge and many others were regular discussants. Don Wheeler chimed in occasionally. Some of the topics really plumbed the depths of epistemology (especially pragmaticist epistemology, a la C. I. Lewis and C. S. Peirce), systems thinking, statistical thinking (especially analytic studies). Some excellent explanations of some otherwise very arcane topics (as well as some lively debates) emerged in those discussions, and I've always been disappointed that after the listserv shut down, no one compiled it or indexed it or made it otherwise available. For a while, you could access an archive at the Deming Institute, but I don't believe that's possible any more.

Anyway, this is a long way to go to say I really enjoyed this article, because it brings some of those philosophical concepts back into the light. I especially thought the discussion of the height of Mt Everest was remeniscent...it brought all the discussions around the vital importance of operational definitions and Deming's quote "There is no true value of anything."