---
title: Cybernetic Governance
summary: "An approach to designing governance systems using the principles of cybernetics — particularly Stafford Beer's Viable System Model — to analyse and redesign how organisations and governments manage complexity, feedback, and adaptation."
---

**Cybernetic governance** applies the principles of [cybernetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics) — the science of regulation, feedback, and control in complex systems — to the design of organisations and governments. Rather than analysing governance through political or legal frameworks, it asks: what are the information flows, feedback loops, and regulatory mechanisms that keep a system viable and adaptive?

The most developed application to governance is Stafford Beer's **Viable System Model (VSM)**, developed in the 1970s and applied most famously to Beer's *Project Cybersyn* — an attempt by the Allende government in Chile to manage the national economy using a real-time information network and the VSM framework.

## Core ideas from the VSM

Beer's model identifies five recursive subsystems that any viable system must have:

1. **Operations** — the primary activities (e.g. service delivery, production)
2. **Coordination** — anti-oscillation, damping conflicts between operational units
3. **Control** — monitoring and managing operations, resource allocation
4. **Intelligence** — scanning the environment, adaptation and future planning
5. **Policy** — identity, values, and ultimate authority

The model is recursive: each operational unit is itself a viable system with the same five subsystems. Breakdowns in governance — dysfunction, unresponsiveness, failure to adapt — can often be diagnosed as missing or broken connections between these subsystems.

## Relevance to democratic design

Cybernetic governance offers a structural language for diagnosing democratic failure that complements political analysis:

- **Accountability sinks** (Dan Davies' concept) can be understood as broken feedback loops between operations and control
- **Representative democracy** can be analysed as a particular design of the intelligence/policy subsystems — with elections as the primary feedback mechanism — and critiqued for the frequency and bandwidth of that feedback
- **Citizens' assemblies** can be understood as alternative intelligence subsystems that provide richer, more considered feedback than elections

Tim Falkiner, a cybernetics researcher who has lectured on the topic at the Parliamentary Counsel offices in Victoria and Tasmania and at Tilburg University, wrote up his framework for [Designing Open Democracy](../organisations/designing-open-democracy.md) — applying Beer's cybernetics, in his words, to "government organized along scientific principles."[^falkiner]

## Further reading

- Beer, Stafford. *Brain of the Firm* (1972) — foundational VSM text
- Beer, Stafford. *Designing Freedom* (1974) — accessible lectures on applying cybernetics to social organisation
- Medina, Eden. *Cybernetic Revolutionaries* (2011) — history of Project Cybersyn

## See also

- [Accountability Sink](accountability-sink.md) — related concept on feedback failure in organisations
- [Designing Open Democracy](../organisations/designing-open-democracy.md) — hosted Falkiner's cybernetic governance write-up

[^falkiner]: "My main thrust is government organized along scientific principles which is as much to say as the application of cybernetic principles to government." Tim Falkiner, ["Designing Open Democracy: State of Democracy In Australia in 2018"](https://www.designingopendemocracy.com/blog/2018/12/18/designing-open-democracy-state-of-democracy-in-australia-in-2018/), Designing Open Democracy, 18 December 2018.
