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.

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.

For a piece of data to have the capacity to affect decisions, it has to arrive in time and in the right form.

• 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.

But they key move was the first one made, and it’s no wonder that it caught on. It was so terribly attractive to, it solved so many problems for and soothed the anxieties of, so many important people.