Everything is driven by Ashbyâs law of requisite variety: a given system has the potential to achieve stability only if every source of variability from the environment is matched by an equal or greater source of variety in the regulatory system.
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Trying to build things meant that everything had to be kept specific, but the theory of information couldnât straightforwardly be applied to massively connected systems. You needed to find a way of describing things that was both rigorous and representative of reality. As economists will tell you, this isnât an easy thing to do.
This law states that anything which aims to be a âregulatorâ of a system needs to have at least as much variety as that system. In order to understand what that means, we need to get a short way into the theory of cybernetics. But for the meantime, for a sort of high-level metaphorical understanding, * think about how you steer various kinds of vehicles. A train can really only go forwards and backwards, so it only needs a single handle. A car can make turns, so its control system requires a steering wheel to represent the added dimension. And an aeroplane needs a joystick rather than a steering wheel, because it can make two kinds of turns. Letâs see where cyberneticians took this idea.
Which to be honest, is often all you really need in these contexts. The whole damn thing* in cybernetics is made of newspapers and high-level analogies. This isnât computer science, where you can point to the states, bits and circuits on a piece of silicon.
If a manager or management team doesnât have information-handling capacity at least as great as the complexity of the thing theyâre in charge of, control is not possible and eventually, the system will become unregulated.
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.
Decision-making systems break down if the variety of their environment is not matched by the variety of their means of regulation. Implicitly, a control system is a model of its environment. If the model is missing important sources of variety in the environment, overestimating the variety of part of the regulatory system, or assuming that information is being transmitted when it isnât, the system will gradually drift out of control without anyone necessarily understanding why.