Professor Stafford Beer - passed away 23 August 2002

[Paul Hollingworth <PH@4gm.com>]

A personal note from Paul Hollingworth.

Some Denizens may not be aware that following several months of illness 
and a cardiac arrest,  Stafford Beer died aged 75 on Friday 23rd August.

Dr Deming was introduced to Stafford's work in the 1980's by Patrick 
Dolan (then General Secretary of the British Deming Association). Deming 
bought and read some of Beer's books (he wrote over a dozen) and the 
development of SoPK was clearly influenced by Beer's 'systems thinking'.

Beer himself was well aware of Shewhart's work and was, by his own 
admission, a big fan of Deming. (Whilst a production manager in the 
1950's Beer developed a device for monitoring massed banks of SPC 
charts). The two men never met, despite my encouraging Stafford on 
several occasions in the early 90's. Both had busy schedules and 
although much the younger man, Stafford was diabetic and did not cope 
well with air travel. So, so far as I know, it never happened.

A career soldier in his youth, Beer will chiefly be remembered for his 
contributions to operational research, cybernetics and  his social 
economy systems work for President Allende in Chile. However, he was a 
true renaissance man; scientist, artist, poet, linguist, musician and 
yoga teacher - to name but a few of his talents. He was a thoroughly 
charming and affectionate man with a mischievous sense of humour (for 
example he once named his house 'Firkins' after a type of beer barrel). 
His humour was much in evidence in his excellent short stories "The 
Chronicles of Wizard Prang". Sadly, I don't know if this little book 
will ever be published, the last time he spoke to me about it he said 
that his publishers did not consider it serious enough. A great pity.

A World Citizen, Stafford was always at the cutting edge, for example 
developing neural networks in the 1960's and using microwave and fibre 
optical technology in Chile the early 70's. He once told me that in the 
1960's he had been retained by one of the big UK Banks as a consultant 
to one of their 'think tanks'. When the CEO terminated his contract he 
thanked Stafford for his contribution but said that some of his ideas 
were becoming just too 'off the wall'. "For example, this idea that by 
using a punched card people could get money out of a machine in the 
street without having to go into a bank! Preposterous!"

In the early 1990's I was helping Stafford with the development of his 
large group intervention process called Syntegrity. This is based around 
the mathematics of an icosahedron (Beer was also a student and great 
admirer of Buckminster Fuller) It was whilst I was doing this, that I 
hit upon the idea of a physical model for Deming's System of Profound 
Knowledge using a tetrahedron made of the same material I was using for 
the icos.

I feel blessed to have spent time with two of the greatest minds of the 
20th Century. Both quite different men but both truly inspiring. Hardly 
a day has gone by since Deming died that I have not thought of him. I 
shall miss Stafford equally. My thoughts are with his partner Allenna, 
and his family at this sad time.

Paul Hollingworth


Footnote:
Interested readers can check out Beer's impressive CV and bibliography 
at http://www.staffordbeer.com/
For those of you who have never read any of his work, I suggest "How 
Many Grapes Went Into The Wine" (named after his 'cost benefit analysis' 
song) as a good starting point. The sub-title is "Stafford Beer on the 
Art and Science of Holistic Management".  Published 1994 by John Wiley.

-- 
Paul Hollingworth                       4GM Consulting
email: PH@4GM.com                       http://www.4GM.com
phone: +44(0) 1423 322225               fax: +44(0) 1423 322205