Abstract

What deliverables did Stafford Beer envision when he developed his “science of effective organisation”? This paper answers this question as: the organisations that use the distinctions of Beer's viable system model. Such organisations are part of daily life, but develop to become knowledge by continuously striving to identify experiences that falsify their existence. They will be irreducible in the sense that any acceptable model of the organisation will be the organisation itself. The notion of knowledge involved is made explicit in the paper as a tribute to Stafford Beer's pioneering work. It allowed Stafford Beer to introduce and develop insights that began to be developed by others only much later