Beer's Viable System Model

Stafford Beer described any viable organization as five interacting systems: operations doing the work, coordination stopping them colliding, control allocating resource and running an audit channel, intelligence watching the outside world, and System 5 holding identity and policy. The model is recursive, so every unit contains the same five.

It matters here because when agents absorb operations and coordination, what remains irreducibly human moves upward into intelligence and identity, and most organizations have never named who holds those. The audit channel is also the ancestor of the Evidence cell.