Designing Collaborative Systems
Have you ever experienced that odd sense of déjà vu during cross-team meetings? The same misunderstandings, repeated clarifications, and “we thought you were doing that” moments?
It’s not just communication. It’s the system.
When two teams, departments, or even organizations try to collaborate, the friction isn’t always personal. More often, it’s structural. The good news? Systems can be designed. And that’s where the VSM Collaboration Canvas comes in.
The Invisible Architect: A Quick Primer on the Viable System Model
The Viable System Model (VSM)—developed by cybernetician Stafford Beer—isn’t another org chart. It’s a map of what makes an organization viable, meaning: able to survive, adapt, and evolve in a changing environment.
Instead of top-down hierarchies, the VSM sees organizations as recursive networks made up of these essential systems:
- S1 – Operations: The value creators.
- S2 – Coordination: The (self)coordination system that prevents chaos.
- S3 – Operative Management: Ensures coherence and allocates resources.
- S3* – Audit & Monitoring: Checking if the system is on course.
- S4 – Strategy: Looks ahead, scans the environment, providing strategies.
- S5 – Identity & Policy: Holds the identity, purpose, values, and norms.
And yes, every viable unit contains these systems. A team, a department, even a startup within a corporate mothership—they’re all systems in a system.
What Is the VSM Collaboration Canvas?
The VSM Collaboration Canvas was created to help two viable systems work together as if they were aware of each other’s structure—not just intentions. It’s like a shared architecture for systemic collaboration and intervention.
This tool could be useful when:
- Two teams have fundamentally different operating models (Agile vs. traditional)
- A corporation partners with a startup
- Internal units in a scaling organization need better cohesion
- You’re building an alliance or joint venture
How Does It Work?
Let’s walk through it like a workshop—because that’s how it’s best used.
Important: Before coming together, each team does a VSM self-diagnosis. You can’t collaborate if you don’t know how you work.
Click here to download an agenda for a 1 day workshop here. You could use the regular VSM Canvas for this exercise if the visualization of the VSM is too overwhelming for the people.
Then, using the canvas, you explore the elements of the VSM. The general procedure is always the same: At first Team X presents the results of the self-assessment then Team Y follows. After the team presentations you always want to understand where you find communalities or differences; and ideate on how to optimize collaboration per system level. Keep always the distinction between formal and informal aspects in mind.
1. The Environments
Who are your customers, regulators, market forces? Each team shares its external reality. You compare notes.
Metaphor: Imagine each team as a boat. You’re comparing ocean conditions before agreeing to sail together.
2. System 1: Value Streams
What do you need from the other team? Why? What deliverables make you successful?
Focus here is on operations: Who passes what to whom, and what quality is expected?
3. System 2: Coordination
How do you avoid stepping on each other’s toes? Daily standups? Shared boards?
You begin building a Meta-System 2: shared coordination rhythms that stabilize the collaboration without centralizing it.
4. System 3 & 3*: Management and Audit
How are priorities managed? Who gets to say “stop”? What happens when there’s overload?
You negotiate a Meta-System 3 (resource bargains, operational coherence mechanisms) and a Meta-System 3* (how we check if it’s working).
Think:
- For S3: Operational steering and planning of resources and interventions.
- For S3*retrospectives, escalation paths.
5. System 4: Strategic Foresight
What’s coming around the corner? Are you watching the same trends? Do you have space to innovate together?
You build a Meta-System 4—your shared radar and innovation backlog.
6. System 5: Identity & Norms
Why are we collaborating in the first place? What are our shared values? What would we never do?
Out of this comes a Meta-System 5—not a policy manual, but a joint compass.
Coming from practice it makes send to state common goals, objectives, and guiding principles to gain clarity.
From Conflict to Coherence
The beauty of the VSM Collaboration Canvas is that it doesn’t assume harmony. It allows for structural tension, but makes that tension explicit. It’s not therapy. It’s design.
More importantly, it upholds a principle many organizations ignore: subsidiarity. The best decisions are made as close to the context as possible—but that doesn’t mean isolation. It means connection with awareness.
When to Use the Canvas
- Beginning a partnership
- Reviving a stagnant cross-functional team
- Post-merger integration
- Scaling Agile beyond one team
- Designing open source ecosystems or community-led structures
Get Started
- Download the VSM Collaboration Canvas (CC0)
- Run a self-assessment workshop for each team
- Book a neutral facilitator with VSM knowledge for the collaboration session
- Design your Meta-System—not to control, but to connect
Final Thoughts
“Design is the ultimate test of theory.” – Buckminster Fuller
In which (meta)system are these two systems operating, when they do not belong to the same organization? Is it a market? Society? Planet Earth?
Disclaimer: The Algedonic System is not part of the canvas. Simply, because I did not have enough time to reflect on it. This shall we part of another iteration.
The self-diagnosis is a real challenge. Its effort shall not be underestimated (1 day workshop) – it is an invest to be able to conduct a productive workshop with the two teams. And even if the collaboration workshop fails, the self-diagnosis as such should be already useful for the specific team. And it is not a drama if the self-diagnosis is not used! Like always: Adapt to the situation.
Once systems become visible, they (may) become viable. With the VSM Collaboration Canvas, you don’t just talk about collaborating—you architect it.
Downloads
The Collaboration Canvas as a editable PowerPoint file.
Self-assessment agenda including guiding questions for the workshop
VSM Collaboration Canvas
One response to “VSM Collaboration Canvas”
All living things are self-regulating, self-governing, and self-reproducing with the ability to adapt to unknowable, dynamic and complex environments. VSM is a necessary, but insufficient, condition for life to become viable. Likewise, no organisation can become feasible with only self-management. Stafford Beer also recognised this shortcoming of VSM when we met in Toronto in 1997.