Stafford Beer’s cybernetics tells us that in these cases, while people’s opinions are important, the facts of the organisational outcomes are what we need to work with. In his most pithy formulation of the principle, he expands the black box principle to a rather more uncomfortable statement.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

Trying to build things meant that everything had to be kept specific, but the theory of information couldn’t 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 isn’t an easy thing to do.

Everything is driven by Ashby’s 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.

If a manager or management team doesn’t have information-handling capacity at least as great as the complexity of the thing they’re in charge of, control is not possible and eventually, the system will become unregulated.

Because, as a decision maker considering a long-term plan, one of the basic things you need to consider is that all your competitors will be doing the same thing.