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.

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

Often, a core skill of middle management is the ability to manipulate the financial reports to compensate for a set of numbers that aren’t giving the right answer. Everyone who has put together a business plan knows that if you can’t fudge the key assumptions to justify the decision your boss wants to make, you don’t know enough about the business.

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.