Metaphorum 2026 · Emerging Methods and Tools, and Contemporary Practice

Designing Heterarchy: An Extension of the Viable System Model for Complex Construction Projects

This paper proposes a heterarchical extension of the Viable System Model for complex construction projects. It argues that the canonical representation of the VSM does not explicitly represent a regulatory pathway through which semantically rich operational knowledge may directly challenge metasystemic assumptions and decisions. Thus, potentially reducing the metasystem’s capacity for learning and second-order error correction. The proposed circular topology, informed by McCulloch and Pitt’s concept of heterarchy, retains Beer's recursive regulatory functions and algedonic channel while adding an explicit, protected “challenge channel” through which frontline participants may transmit semantically rich challenges, concerns, emerging threats, and improvement proposals, based on relevant operational information, to the appropriate regulator. The challenge channel bypasses managerial suppression, but not necessary variety management. Its purpose is to reduce the attenuation and distortion of situated operational knowledge, enable anticipatory correction, and allow System 1 participants to challenge the assumptions, models, and decisions through which the metasystem regulates both their work and their continuously changing task environment. The proposed extension draws on the ideas of Gordon Pask, McCulloch, Pitts, Heinz Von Foerster and Stafford Beer. It is supplemented through observations from the management of a complex heavy-industrial construction project, where a formal organizational policy of Challenge Culture provided an empirical example of distributed challenge as a cybernetic mechanism for requisite variety management. Speaker: Benjamin Wood

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