Viable system model

Viable System Model: A theory for designing more responsive organisations

By Angela Espinosa

angela-espinosa
Angela Espinosa (biography)

How can communities, businesses, regions, and nations – which can all be thought of as organisations – be designed to be capable of dealing quickly and effectively with environmental fluidity and complexity?

The Viable System Model, often referred to as VSM, is a theory that posits that a complex organisation is more capable of responding to a changing and unpredictable environment, if it is:

  • composed of autonomous, effective, and agile subsidiary organisations,
  • highly connected to each other, and
  • cohesively operating with shared ethos, purpose, processes, and technologies. 

A complex organisation therefore has multiple levels of nested organisations, each adhering to these principles.

The building blocks of the Viable System Model are five interconnected systems.

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How systems thinking enhances systems leadership

By Catherine Hobbs and Gerald Midgley

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1. Catherine Hobbs (biography)
2. Gerald Midgley (biography)

Systems leadership involves organisations, including governments, collaborating to address complex issues and achieve necessary systemic transformations. So, if this is the case, how can systems leadership be helped by systems thinking?

Systems leadership is concerned with facilitating innovation by bringing together a network of organisations. These then collaborate between themselves and with other stakeholders to deliver some kind of service, influence a policy outcome or develop a product that couldn’t have been achieved by any one of the organisations working alone.

Recognising that a network of organisations can achieve something that emerges from their interactions involves a certain amount of implicit systems thinking. After all, the classic definition of a ‘system’ is an identifiable collection of two or more parts that has properties, or achieves outcomes, that can only be attributed to all of the parts interacting, not any one of the parts in isolation.

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