Viability

Organizations are - by nature - complex systems. They are comprised of people, products, processes, customers, suppliers, and market dynamics. Leaders in rapidly changing markets have to deal with complexity on a daily basis and stay adaptable. The problem is that there are all sorts of other factors that make business complex. It is very hard to know, however, which bits are essential and which are accidental; some you must keep, others must be discarded. Throwing out the former, and keeping the latter is a recipe for disaster. Vice versa, and your face is on the cover of BusinessWeek.

As managers grapple with layers of complexity, leaders must be able to decipher essential and accidental complexity. To do this, they need to understand what makes their organization - their system - viable. If you try to touch all complexity and simplify things that can't - and shouldn't - be simplified, you can create a disaster. To determine what makes your system viable you need a lens that clearly shows what makes your organization thrive and survive. As the market changes, that understanding will ensure adaptability.

The Viable System Model is a powerful tool, a lens, to help leaders think about and understand what makes their organization run in the best, most productive manner. With this clarity, they can have managers focus the majority of their time on dealing with essential complexity. What should our strategy be? Who are our best customers? Do we have too many suppliers or not enough? Are all of these meetings necessary - which ones should be cancelled? Kept?

Without such a lens, it is surprisingly difficult to reliably distinguish between what is essential and what is not. Gaining insights into your organization's core purpose (i.e., the value that it delivers to and receives from the market), management structures, controls, decision making, communication channels, networks, interactions, etc. becomes your way of ensuring that the organization has what it needs to succeed in today's environment and adapt for tomorrow's changing world.

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