This is the third and last part of my conversation with Luc Hoebeke on representations. If you haven’t read the first and the second part, I’d recommend you do that before reading this one.
Ivo:
So, we talked about information, models, organizations, and society. Now, let’s go back to the individual. Can you start by retelling the story about your friend who has a relative declared dead by mistake and cannot prove her identity without a representation of the identity?
Luc:
The father of one of my good friends died, and by some bureaucratic error, it was his mother who was noticed in the bank as dead.
The one who is confronted with reality and acts in reality is responsible.
Ivo:
Instead of the father?
Luc:
Yes. The whole difficulty that she had to prove that she was not dead, and that went — and that's your story about non-accountability — to the directorate of the bank. Fortunately, because this friend is in information systems and had connections, he could lobby, and they could rectify the error. It's a cascading of distrust and unaccountability. That's why the book about unaccountability is so marvelous. My article about responsibility is making a difference between accountability and responsibility. That's also Elliott Jaques who has that accountability is a formal phenomenon. There is a group of people. If something goes wrong, I cannot talk to all these people together. There is someone appointed as accountable. I talk with him. There's accountability, but he's not responsible for what went wrong. The whole idea now is that ministers have to have to leave their jobs because some error has happened. This is so stupid. It's a completely false idea about responsibility. The one who is confronted with reality and acts in reality is responsible. The Accountability may be that if he follows the procedure, and the procedure is a closed system, which does not correspond to reality, then the one who has made the procedure has to take responsibility because that was his product. But there's never a discussion about the procedure. It's always a person who has to be responsible, and that's in your book, and that's why, in organizations, I come back to organizations, I say staff functions have to be stopped. Silo staff functions are the worst invention of human beings. From where did they come? Staff functions come from the army. The general in chief cannot know everything. Thus, he needs staff. The Weltanschauung is that he should know everything. But why should he know everything? He's not God. And that's the whole hierarchy and staff functions: a godlike heaven. But we are in a world where, as Stafford said, there is variety. There's no variety in heaven. There you don't have to bother about variety. But once you have variety, it doesn't work anymore. The whole organizational structure is unaccountable.
Laws should be experiments. Implementing a law is nonsensical.
Staff functions are saying how things must be done, but they are never responsible for the effects. It's always a human failure. The procedure is always right: that is also a human error. Staff functions are made by people, and they make errors. That's one of the things that I introduced to quality systems. A new procedure is an innovation. We have to experiment with it, and only after the experiment do we see what works and what doesn’t work. Then, two things happen: the procedure simplifies and works better. Because you create a tool. The procedures are useful tools to learn to confront a certain variety. When you test the tool on the user side, you begin to criticize the tool, etc, and you begin to criticize the staff, which is taboo in organizations. The staff is always right. Laws should be experiments. Implementing a law is nonsensical. When we want to regulate something, whatever we name it, let's try it out. It's an innovation. Let's scale it down, small scale, bigger scale. That is innovation. Yeah, see if it works on a bigger scale, and so on. That's the way laws should be introduced.
Ivo:
Like in software. The first version is full of bugs.
Luc:
Exactly. There's a learning process. Learning to confront what you thought, the representation of reality, with the variety in reality. You always get the confrontation with the materiality of this reality. The disembodiment of all these things is creating heaven. But in fact, it's creating hell.
Ivo:
That's great. Okay, now, let's go back again to the representative democracy. The idea that it doesn't work on a big scale. It might work only in small scale. Do you have new thoughts about the idea that if this is applied but always in a small scale, such as a city or a region, it actually might work?
Luc:
When you say it might work, you might be able to cope with its errors. You won’t have perfect democracy, but when the small scale allows for trial and error, it becomes much more human. One of the things that went wrong with science after the Renaissance, because, where the idea of aggregates came from? It comes from accounting, counting things and adding things that are quite different, but you add them as if they are the same. You add apples and pears, and you say, that's fruit, and you abstract it, and you forget about the apples and the pears. Now, accounting is nothing else than summing up, always summing up. The accounting system is splitting and summing up. Nonrelational. An added addition is nonrelational. Thus, while human affairs are fundamentally relational, the basic instrument that the economy has found is absolute, nonrelational. That's accounting. And that's Piketty. Piketty was originally a mathematician. He pointed to all these figures, gross national product, losses and profits and so on, are additions. Additions are not relational and have no meaning. In fact, the accountant is a politician; my father was an accountant who gives meaning to the figures, and a good accountant gives relevant meaning, and a bad accountant plays with it for their own profit. But the accounting system in our world just adds. The addition is at the base of aggregates and aggregate thinking and is fundamentally flawed because it is nonrelational, while systems are fundamentally relational.
Work in organization, I said. No, no, we are outside. We look at it objectively. It's your good right to be stupid. But then don't teach it. Don't say it is the truth.
The whole stock exchange is a Ponzi scheme, creating money by money by money. That has to fall down. That's automatic. They find economic reasons: economists are the most stupid people.
Ivo:
It's quite strong also in this Unaccountability Machine by
.Luc:
I like the unaccountability machine. Accounting is unaccountable.
Ivo:
He writes a lot about accounting and the economy, and he knows it from the inside because he is an economist, a recovering one.
Luc:
There are some critical economists, but they are not liked. One experience I had, someone asked me to give a seminar in Fontainebleau in France. I met the professors. My way of working and thinking about organizations is action research. Every organization is new. You have to act. And when I use the word action research, they said no, no, no, it must be positivistic, scientific. It's all objective, and surely no action. Thus INSEAD is a school of irresponsible people, making irresponsible people. That’s true for all management schools: creating elites of unaccountable people. I had the same experience at Vlerick School. Work in organization, I said. No, no, we are outside. We look at it objectively. It's your good right to be stupid. But then don't teach it. Don't say it is the truth.
Ivo:
Yes, stupidity is a privilege of humans. All other animals would be dead if they believe the nonsence that humans believe. It was Konrad Lorenz who said something along these lines, not sure exactly how he had put it as I learned about it from a podcast with Manfred Laubichler.
Luc:
Right. But, unfortunately, that stupidity creates lots of victims.
Ivo:
What do you mean concretely?
Luc:
Well, look at what happens in the world. The phenomenon of Trump or Johnson. In fact, they are bound to express human stupidity because of the way in which it's organized. And that's where Stafford Beer is so important. But he never expressed it that way but he sees systems as interconnected tribes, which are balancing each other, it's a bit linked to your idea about the balance between cohesion and freedom. I find his viable system model is tackling that issue, in my opinion.
Ivo:
In fact, the balance between autonomy and cohesion was inspired from there, but I use it in a slightly different way. In the VSM, system three provides cohesion, while system two, outside system three, provides coordination and works as an anti-oscillatory mechanism. In my treatment of autonomy and cohesion, cohesion is making a whole or working as a whole. So, I use cohesion as an umbrella concept for both cohesion in S3 terms and coordination in S2 terms. That’s one of the differences. But otherwise, it's inspired from there.
Luc:
The VSM was misunderstood as a hierarchical system. It is not a hierarchical system, it is a recursive system. And it's always messed up: system three must be management. No, system three is the meeting of the system ones. That's the conferences I was talking about, the search conferences. There were people of system one getting aware that they are a whole. Autonomy is bound by the whole. People with initiative, who have their followers, who want to start something. The others don't know the position of that person. We started with names and surnames. Always names and surnames. No departments. Departments don't work. Names and surnames. People have to sign their own names. It's prohibited to say it's a Department. The project is a child who tries to get born. It can be a stillbirth. Nobody knows it because it's risky, innovative. Yeah, and you are the parent or not the parents, but you are the uncles and the aunts who say, I like that that happens. I don't know if it will succeed or not, but I agree with my name. You can put my name on the birth card. That's a metaphor I used, yeah, but with name and surname, never a department or a staff function, because organizations are networks of tribes, and that's where Stafford Beer has not been understood because it's very difficult to understand recursivity.
Ivo:
I also think that this overemphasis on the graphical representation of models was counterproductive. I found issues with the channels, that mixture of generic and example models, the notation itself and the hierarchical implication that you mentioned. I tried to solve them using a different rendition, as a circle. But that redrawing was still one hundred percent corresponding to the VSM, as explained in the text, just fixing the issues with the VSM diagrams. Later, I abandoned diagrams for VSM altogether.
Luc:
Also the fact that systems three, four and five form unity. You cannot separate them organizationally. They are homeostatic together. In fact, I wrote that system five is non existing in that sense that it is the relation between system four and system three.
Ivo:
Can you tell me more about that?
Luc:
Well, it is the contradiction between system three, which is busy with maintaining, keeping things going, and those who say, if everything goes well, I have to change it. That’s innovation. The disturbing factor. This tension creates the identity of that organization. Representative of the organizations belong to system three or system four, as mentality. There is no such thing as system five person.
Ivo:
I’m not very comfortable talking about it in functionalist terms, but if we are talking about some kind of roles, apart from the balancing role between three and four, doesn’t it also have an identity-keeping role?
Luc:
For me, the way the tension between three and four is expressed is the identity.
Ivo:
That’s very interesting, and I can imagine many VSM zealots will disagree with you.
Luc:
Yes, yes. This tension is needed. An only-system-three organization is bound to die. An only-system-four organization is bound to explode. A healthy organization is one in which this tension is manageable. In search conferences, operational people worked together with innovation people. And for the projects that came out of it, no veto can take place. The operational people had the final say about the means. They must agree to keep some resources to try that out. These are the system-three people, they are the ones to keep cohesion. But they should be able to assess that to maintain the cohesion, you have to disrupt it. No further than that. And research and development, if they are really research and development, they should also understand the need for cohesion. I worked for an innovative company, and they had in their human resources system that their best innovators had to work one or two years in a subsidiary as managers against their very will, against their will. That's part that was part of the curriculum.
Ivo:
Where was that?
Luc:
That was at the time there was Océ van der Grinten. It was as in Holland. They made photocopiers. Now, it has been taken over by Canon, but they have a very interesting history because they started with margarine colors, and they transformed it by making blueprints for architects and then went to copiers. And then they went to digital. They were always ahead. But they had two things. In personal development, everyone had, even if it was against the grain, had to be active in research and development and active in operational things. Secondly, they had defined a budget for research and development, which was a percentage of the business, not of the profit, but of the turnover, whatever the circumstances, even if it was in loss. These were two key ideas that made it an innovative company. And when they left this policy, they were bought over in two years by Canon. Because the management went to business schools. There they went, very busy with strategy and all that nonsense.
Ivo:
Can you connect these things now? That story you told about that lady who could not prove that she was alive, and link that somehow with how the representation of that person in a certain group can work better than national elections. In what other way can society be more capable of seeing and acting on its errors?
Luc:
The concept of responsibility, as it is used, is very counterproductive. It's always the same people you see on television while there are many more representatives. And I remember when I was a kid, for the elections, the electoral units were much smaller. There were discussions in the cafeterias with people of different parties. But there were many more faces. What is the number of faces you see now? The whole Republican Party is Trump.
With advertising, the whole system becomes a propaganda system, and the voting process becomes a marketing process
The more faces you have, also the smaller the districts where you can choose representatives, it becomes more human. That's related to the perversity of the broadcasting media. Representation has always an explicit or implicit intention, the media have more and more the explicit intention to get money for advertisers. For instance, Vera made a thesis about the press in the 60s, at the end of her studies, yeah, looking at the aggregation of printed journals. She came to the conclusion that, in fact, where in the 19th century, first half of the 20th century, journals were expressions of ideologies. It was the readers and the sponsors behind the ideology who paid for it. After the Second World War, the universal advertising became the biggest income. When advertising becomes the biggest income, the whole media changes its nature. What is news? Whatever gives advertising. Readers have no place anymore. Previously, you had many reader columns. The readers could react. With advertising, the whole system becomes a propaganda system, and the voting process becomes a marketing process. The citizen is seen as a customer in a marketing game. That's one of the elements that are perverting the system. The other element is that it has become a zero sum game. It is a win-lose game, and a win-lose game is war and violence. In the classical democracies, although the elections were win-lose games, the people involved dealt with one another, also beforehand, for the coalitions and so on. Now, because of this marketing universal, the win-lose becomes much stronger, and the violence becomes much stronger, I mean, violence in language. And then you get this kind of impossible task before the elections. The others are always bad. After the election, you have to work with them. Before the elections, we have to take into account already of this difference. Now the differences are exacerbated, and that's the advertising aspect so that it becomes much more difficult to get together again.
These are the dynamics I see that are perverting democracy now. Scale: you don't see your representative anymore. You see the wave De Wever. You see in every context the same face. But that's linked. It becomes business. Now I will state strongly: political career is corrupt. Power is not something to be sold and bought. The people to be elected were sorted out by lottery in Athens, as a citizen could be elected, he becomes on the electoral list, which is small scale. Have you heard about David Van Reybrouck? He wrote a marvellous book about Congo and also about Indonesia, but he wrote also a small booklet Against Elections. And he refers to this mechanism. There are some experiments in the German speaking part of Belgium. They started it in the previous elections, citizens sorted out by lottery who have a kind of advisory they can bring items to the table of the government.
Ivo:
And does it work? It sounds fascinating, but does it work?
Luc:
Yes, yes. It works. And it's linked to this is the careerism in political representative function. It should be something that you do for some time. That's why lottery is working. You do it for some time, and then you do your own business.