Economists end up solving this problem by denying it (a mechanism that Stafford Beer looked at in detail, concluding that ignorance is a kind of information processing system of last resort). Where analysis fails, ideology steps in, and the solution the economists decided on was to fantasise an equivalent system for producers — a profit-maximising firm with an understanding of its market, a style production process and a manageable set of decisions. It ended up going disastrously wrong, but the original intellectual sin may have been the failure to respect the integrity of the black box.

An organisation does things, and it systematically does some things rather than others. But that’s as far as it goes. Systems don’t make mistakes — if they do something, that’s their purpose. But it also works the other way around. Systems don’t have inner desires, so they don’t do things intentionally either. There’s just a network of cause and effect. We might think they’re conspiring, but they’re working within structures that made the outcome inevitable. Or we might see everything as a terrible cock-up, but we don’t understand that the outcome was the inevitable result of the way the system works.

This sort of decision is fundamental to the cybernetic analysis of systems; you are always attenuating variety in some way or other unless you are describing a system that consists of everything in the universe.

• There are five core functions, and if any of them are missing or under-resourced, the flow of information won’t be balanced with the capacity to process it.

• Information only counts if it’s being delivered in a form in which it can be translated into action, and this means that it needs to arrive quickly enough.

• Systems preserve their viability by dealing with problems as much as possible at the same level at which they arrive, but they also need to have communication channels that cross multiple levels of management, to deal with big shocks that require immediate change.

And this story repeats itself through the history of management science; almost every classic of the literature seems to have described a way of adapting systems to a more complicated world, and then to have become obsolete itself. If you look past the slogans and think about what things like ‘management by objectives’, ‘focus on core competences’ and so on actually mean, they are all different ways of advising executives to restructure their businesses so that they don’t generate complexity faster than it can be managed.