Exploded View 1 — The Company as a Metasystem

Part One in one drawing. Every label points to something you have already met; look closely for the small jokes.

Everything in Part One is somewhere in this building. Start at the bottom and work up.

• The work floor is where the product actually gets made, and where the sticky notes live: the metis of Chapter 1, the knowledge that never reaches a form.
• The basement holds the remainder from Chapter 10 — the hard, rare, unautomated part of the job — and the one person still practised enough to do it.
• Coordination is Beer’s System 2 from Chapter 4: necessary, until the meetings start being about other meetings (Chapter 14). Look for the thermostat, faithfully regulating the lamp beside it (Chapter 2).
• The dashboard floor holds the model of the work, not the work — green in every tile.
• The roof carries the policy layer: the model the building has of itself, identity (System 5), and a planned new layer to govern the others (Chapter 3). The antenna points at the future; the chair beside it, for System 4, is empty.
• Down the outside wall hangs the cord from Chapter 12. Within reach of everyone. Look closely at the top.
• Inside the right-hand wall, in orange, runs the backchannel — the load-bearing work that appears on no board.