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.

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.

The ability to translate information into action is the last piece of the puzzle, but it might have been the first piece because it’s so crucial.

• 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.