POSIWID — The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does

I’m super excited to announce the working title of an upcoming book, by Harish Jose: For Us… Cybernetics as a Human Practice.

This is very much his life’s work on Cybernetics - over 400 pages of profound insights. A masterpiece that I can’t wait to read myself. The book is scheduled to be published later this year and will be available for free to all the members of the Cyb3rSyn Community.

Ebook and print editions will also be available for purchase - I’ll send out discount codes to all the subscribers of the Cyb3rSyn Newsletter when the book is ready to order.

Without further ado, here is the sneak preview of one of the chapters, focussing on a topic that always triggers passionate conversations within the systems thinking community.

I have seen The Gods Must Be Crazy several times, and the Coke bottle still stops me.

The movie came out in 1980, directed by Jamie Uys. The setup is simple. A pilot flying over the Kalahari Desert throws an empty Coke bottle out of his cockpit window. For the pilot, the bottle had one purpose: to hold a soft drink. That purpose is finished. The bottle is trash.

It falls into a different world.

Xi and his San tribe have never seen glass. The bottle lands without breaking. They take it for a gift from the gods and begin, with considerable ingenuity, to find out what it is for. They use it to cure animal hides, to carry water, to grind roots, to roll dough, to make music, to trace decorative circles in the sand. Each person who picks it up finds a different use. Each use is the purpose, for that person, at that moment.

Then it becomes something else again. Only one bottle exists. Everyone wants it. The peaceful tribe fractures along the lines of its demand. The purpose is now conflict. Xi eventually concludes the bottle is an evil thing and makes a long journey to throw it off the edge of the world.

From outside the movie, watching, the bottle has a purpose that none of the characters could name. It is a plot device. It sets the story in motion. That purpose belongs to the filmmaker and the viewer. From a further remove still, it provides work: for the actors, the crew, the technicians who made the movie possible. It exists at a level entirely removed from any use Xi’s tribe found for it.

Same object. Pilot, tribe member, viewer: three different positions, and purposes that do not overlap. Not one of them is wrong.

Stafford Beer, the management cybernetician whose Viable System Model occupies the next chapter, had a name for what the bottle is demonstrating:

The purpose of a system is what it does. POSIWID. Beer arrived at this formulation after years of working with organizations that said one thing and did another. It is a diagnostic commitment more than a definition. When you want to understand what an arrangement is actually for, watch what it consistently produces. Watch who benefits and who does not. Watch what gets prioritized when resources are scarce and the declared purpose conflicts with something else. The Coke bottle’s purpose, in that sense, is never in the bottle. It is always in the encounter between the bottle and whoever is holding it.