ViPlan Learning System

by Raul Espejo

The Viplan Software (Viplan Learning System) explains both Stafford Beer's Viable System Model and Raul Espejo's Viplan Method. It was developed in the 90s and is currently used by enterprises and educational institutions in different parts of the world, including the Open University in the United Kingdom. It is currently available in English and Spanish.

The Viplan Method has underpinned both Syncho's and Phrontis's use of the Viable System Model (VSM) over a number of years. This method offers an approach to diagnose and design an organisation's structure based on its vision, mission and strategy. It takes into account the varied viewpoints of the people involved in organizations and uses the Viable System Model to make structural issues apparent.

Though Viplan Learning System is for all practical purposes a book it is not intended to be read over a number of hours from beginning to end and then returned to its shelf; it is a learning system that invites you to reflect upon organisational issues and check them against the experience of Trident Engineering, a small UK company, and of course against your personal experience. Often you will need to re-read certain parts and move inwards, outwards, forwards and backwards in multiple layers of explanations. Learning from it implies an effort in systemic thinking; it invites the integration of ideas and concepts into a coherent body of knowledge.

Those of you who become engaged by the software's content most likely will continue a conversation with others and us on related topics. Studying the Viplan Software should trigger questions and also require clarification of the terms used in it. Once you have explored the use of this learning software you are invited to visit www.syncho.com . Here you will be able to interact with both the Glossary and its dynamic definition of VSM and Viplan terms, and the Questions and Answers about different categories of VSM/Viplan related issues. Users of these two options will be able to engage in conversations with us and also with the wider community of users.

The Glossary offers definitions for an evolving list of terms whose meanings are intended to be coherent in the context of the body of knowledge offered by the VSM and Viplan. Therefore our aim is to make these terms components of a coherent language, whose mastery gives users skills to diagnose and design organisations. It is because we are aiming to establishing systemic meanings to each of the terms that we want to pay particular emphasis to their related terms, thus defining a network of concepts and ideas with closure. Isolated revision of some of them may be helpful but not as helpful as understanding the relationships that make terms components of a language. Operationally, our expectation is that the study of Viplan Learning System will trigger in the reader's mind the need to clarify some of the terms used in it, leading to questions, appreciations, comments that can be transmitted to us using the Glossary's option. Thus, if you send us 'Your comments about this definition' attached to each definition of a term, first the term will appear flagged in the Glossary by 'new comment' in red, indicating that someone has left a comment, and second we will give an answer to the comment and if necessary adjust the definition of the term. If this happens then the term will be flagged by 'new definition' for the next two weeks.

The Questions and Answers option offers the opportunity to select a category of questions, leave a question and follow it through as a conversation evolves. For many questions the chances are that an answer will clarify the situation, however for some of them we may expect that controversy may ensue and that further exploration may be necessary. For these more controversial questions we will open a new category and interested people will be able to follow in this category the specific debate. Of course, for us the creation of new categories is very desirable; it would be a good sign of a lively community of ideas and possibly of practices.

Syncho's expectation is that making freely available the software, complemented by the Glossary and Questions and Answers options, will enable a distributed learning process that hopefully will support further developments in the understanding of the Viable System Model and in its application.

Click REQUEST A COPY OF VIPLAN SOFTWARE and complete the requested screens with accurate and meaningful data. The process involves human intervention and only those requests with legitimate data will be fulfilled. On this occasion only, your data will be shared with SYNCHO Limited.

The copyright for ViPlan belongs to SYNCHO Limited.