The recursive structure that the Viable System Model implicates enables inventing the organisation at every autonomous unit that is embedded within other larger autonomous units. Inventing the organisation and working out its future, in fact, is the concern of everybody in the organisation at all levels. Everyone should contribute to the process through the autonomous units that they belong to throughout the entire recursion structure. Invention comes out from conversations that take place in all the autonomous units exactly like the way it comes out of conversations that take place at the highest corporate level of the firm. Assessing threats and opportunities and maximising on strengths to overcome weaknesses is the task of divisions as much as it is for corporate management that is to enable distributed strategic management.
Distributed problem solving is one of the major aims of the VSM where responsibility and authority are given to those who relate directly to the arising problems. It focuses on giving the primary tasks all what they need to attain viability, thus the problem solving capacity will be distributed to the autonomous primary tasks only. Hence, employees at every autonomous local level must also have access to relevant information generated by MIS in order to attain the necessary capacity for local problem solving.
The law of requisite variety which the VSM is based on suggests that the variety of managers are less than the variety of the organisation which has also a variety less than its surrounding environment. Thus, attenuators are employed in two levels, externally and internally, to filter out those information that are not relevant and not consistent with the response capacity of the organisation and managers.
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Managers are traditionally too involved in solving the daily problems instead of spending their time on making policies that balance the internal and the external filtration systems of the complexity sources.
