Cybernetic AI Leadership with the Viable System Model
In the last post, we explored how AI can accelerate the discovery of user needs, helping us to stay grounded in the lived experience of our customers. But as we get better at sensing and responding to these needs, we face a new challenge: how do we design an organisation that can adapt and evolve at the speed of AI?
Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM)—a cybernetic blueprint for balancing autonomy and control—offers leaders a way to orchestrate humans and AI agents without drowning in complexity. The VSM breaks any adaptive organisation into five interacting systems that sense, coordinate, direct, and reinvent themselves. While Wardley Maps reveal evolutionary position, the VSM explains how to keep each component both autonomous and aligned. Embedding the model inside AI-era governance exposes where automation should amplify judgement—and where humans must remain the damping function.