Metaphorum 2026 · Barefoot Cybernetics

Beer’s Pedagogy: Lessons from the Concordia University Lectures

Stafford Beer’s writings have been widely recognized as novel, erudite, profound and influential, shaping decades of contributions from scholars and practitioners alike. They have also been criticized as opaque and difficult to apply, contributing to a tendency for his work to exist on the margins of mainstream academia and management. Beer was sensitive to these critiques. By his own account, he penned Diagnosing the System in part to address these concerns. In it, he provides a step-by-step stripped-down approach to understanding and deploying the viable systems model (VSM) for managers and others interested in how the analytical tool could help with real-world decision-making. In the forward to Diagnosing the System, Beer says the book was inspired and shaped by his experienced co-teaching the VSM in a seminar course offered at Concordia, Montreal, Canada, in 1981-82.  He devotes the book to the students of this class, insisting that the book resulted from “my learning.” My contribution will share reflections on what we can learn from Stafford Beer’s approach to pedagogy by analyzing recently digitalized recordings of these lectures.  My method is interpretative and is inspired by a second-order cybernetics perspective of a ‘model of the modeler,’ paying close attention to Beer’s pedagogical approach and indications of self-awareness about his pedagogical style. I expect that this analysis will help us understand how we might learn from Beer’s pedagogy and better communicate and teach about the VSM. It will also shed some light on Beer’s time in Canada, a place he would eventually call home until his passing in 2002 and which figured prominently in Diagnosing the System and in other of his later works. Speaker: Marc-André Pigeon — Canadian Centre for the Study of Co-operatives

Schedule to be confirmed