“One of the key edicts of management cybernetics is that “it is not necessary to look inside the black box in order to understand its behaviour”. But this is only true a) if you’ve made the right decisions about how to divide things up into black boxes and b) if you’re prepared to accept that the behaviour of the black box might often be really quite illogical or pathological. Most of the time, corporate decision-making systems are what Beer called “muddy boxes” – the extent to which you can understand the internal workings depends on how much effort you are prepared to put in. And in my view, it’s often important to spend at least some time wiping the glass on the muddy box, to be sure that you have an accurate picture of the true inputs and outputs”