The largest living animal is the blue whale. From there we go to a different kind of living system--ecosystems.
How much complexity can the VSM, even in recursions, handle? Stafford Beer designed it, or at least used it, to improve the viability of business organizations or governmental organizations. The VSM focuses on the Environment, the Operating System and the Metasystem; and their essential communication channels.
Beer attempted to use it with the industrial system of Chile. A whale?
**The limits of the VSM**--From Whales to Ecosystems: Historically, the VSM has dealt with discrete systems, even large ones, my "whales." Discretely bounded living systems.
Ecosystems are a different kind of system, a different kind of living system. One that is created and sustained/or killed by its "outward" interactions.
VSM focuses mostly on how the organization functions--internally at two levels: operating system and metasystem.
Ecosystems can mostly ignore the inside of parts of organisms, as it is the interactions between the organizations (parts) that form and sustain those parts--from the ecosystemic point of view. The inside can be consider "black boxes" when considering ecosystems.
Systems thinking plus **ecosystems thinking** are complimentary but have quite different sensibilities and sensitivities.
It will come down to structure and styles of communication, connections, that cause effects, even if only indirect influence.
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# THESIS: VSM System 2 has degrees of freedom that Systems 1, 3, 4 and 4 do not have.
System 2 allows immense freedom, tempered by coordination affordances--providing awareness of how not to step on anyone else and thus how to avoid being stepped on.
In the civic social world, System 3 must devote itself to the aliveness of System 2, not so much to Systems 1, 4, and 5.
System 5 and 4 must also focus on the aliveness of System 2. System 2 is about the viability of System 1s thriving in ecosystems.
It is Robin Asby's version of System 2, The Community Collective 
that I am thinking of.
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_We can use Leo's "Quest Wall" to explore homeostatic conversations of a System 2._