Viable Systems Model: An Interdisciplinary and Practical Model in Strategic Designing of Public Organizations

Nowadays, management and organization is rife with various dichotomies which turn management to the easy but at the same time difficult action, especially in public organizations; dichotomies such as control vs. flexibility, centralization vs. decentralization, inside vs. outside view and so on. In fact, appropriate and optimal aggregation of these dichotomies is very effective in success of management and organization’s performance and it, at least theoretically, lies in system approach. The Viable Systems Model (VSM) is based on Organizational Cybernetics, as a main branch of system approach, which, through making use of the advantages of interdisciplinary approach, could largely solve and minimize the distance between these dichotomies. Although this systemic model is well-known in other countries and has been implemented in various projects from firm level to public administration level, it is not well-recognized in Iran. Therefore, it is necessary to present theoretical and practical concepts of this model to the Iranian scientific and managerial society. This article, with the aim of compensating for theoretical poverty in extant studies, by using documentary methods, reviews these main subjects: basic concepts of VSM such as cybernetics, variety engineering, recursivity and autopoiesis, the interdisciplinary aspects of model (at least in three subjects: its origin, the system of research problems and subjects, and solutions and modus operandi), methodology and five systems of VSM, VSM in action and some of its applications and also some advantages and critique of VSM, and finally, some implications of VSM in designing public organizations structures in Iran.