Outcome over representation

But Beer started from this realization: in a world of exceedingly complex systems, for which any representation can only be provisional, performance is what we need to care about.
(Andrew Pickering, 2010, The Cybernetic Brain)

Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask both insisted on defining thinking as actual performance, producing an observable outcome. From an evolutionary perspective, performance is what matters. Whether the "thinking" is accomplished via conscious symbolic cognition or stigmergic pheremone trails or trophic networks is irrelevant, as long as you're getting information and doing something about it.

The cybernetic focus on performance offers a pragmatic rejoinder to the Cartesian Theater model of thinking, which tends to insist that "actual thinking" somehow happens outside of the performative system, in a kind of infinite regress. Little guys, all the way down. It seems more likely that the Cartesian way of thinking about thinking is a misframing born out of our lived experience as symbolic cognizers.

Beer had a deep skepticism toward representational forms of knowledge. On their biological computing project:

In the sort of machines that [Pask] and I have been concerned with, you cannot get at the intermediate answer... you do not know what the answer is. Now this sounds absurdly naïve, but it is not, because you do not want the answer. What you do want is to use this answer. (Stafford Beer)

This perspective lead Beer to believe that ecosystems are smarter than we are.

See also: The purpose of a system is what it does, Ecosystems are smarter than we are, Cybernetics.