Metaphorum 2026 · Toward Resilient and Ethical Viable Systems

Ecocybernetics and the Living Foundations of Beer's Viable System Model

Enterprises are complex, especially in turbulent environments. Yet when dense complications become coherent complexes—as they do in healthy life and ecosystems—enterprises become flexible, performative, viable, and resilient: a managerial sweet spot. These are characteristic features of healthy life, ecological biocommunities, and enterprises at their best. Management of such enterprises is both eased and more readily distributed. Beer’s profound innovations in management theory and systems practice place the viability of life at the centre. This chapter draws on developments in biology and a reframing of cybernetics to illuminate and extend his approach. It first establishes the management problem and then explores ecocybernetics as a perceptual frame for the VSM. Particular attention is given to identity as the organizing principle of viability, to homological metamorphosis as the means by which identity persists through change, and to the perceptual navigation through which animate agents reproduce both ecosystems and enterprises. These themes help explain how viable enterprises conserve coherence while supporting autonomy, adaptation, and innovation. Speaker: Angus Jenkinson — Cybernetics Society

Schedule to be confirmed