Money, Time and Variety Engineering: The Application of Cybernetics to the Diagnosis and Design of Financial Performance Management Systems

Variety engineering was the term coined by Stafford Beer to describe the management of the system of constraints placed on an organisation. Successful variety engineering involves working with the demands of Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety; matching regulatory variety with that of the situation being regulated. Money is an important mechanism for variety engineering: the allocation of financial resources helps amplify variety; its withdrawal attenuates. This paper argues that budgeting, the conventional approach to the management of financial resources, demonstrably does not have requisite variety. This fact could be manifest in a range of undesirable patterns of behaviour. The practice of budgeting has not, however, been seriously challenged by systems theorists nor alternative mechanisms proposed. This paper sets to remedy this by describing how the cybernetic regulation of the flow of financial resources can be incorporated into the framework provided by Beer’s Viable Systems Model.