Further complications arise as you start to consider bigger and more realistic systems. For example, you usually need to respect the fact that the system is dynamic in time, and to ensure that the regulator can take in information faster than the system can generate variety, and respond to it quickly. You also need to build translation capacity into the system, so that every black box receives its inputs in a format that it can convert to outputs. In many large organisations, a significant proportion of the staff carry out actions that might be seen as the equivalent of taking a note on the vet’s prescription pad and ensuring that it affects what’s on the squirrel’s feeding tray.

There are two obvious failure modes here — changing too much, and changing too little. If the orchestra never changes its programme it will stagnate, but if it changes too often the musicians will be under-rehearsed and quality will suffer. The Variety transmitted from the intelligence function needs to be matched both to the change it anticipates in the environment and to the capacity of the operational function to reorganise itself.

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.

The generic solutions are not always bad. A lot of management problem are surprisingly generic: a missing communication channel or a failure to notice that the environment has changed. If the problem is understood correctly, the solution is usually quite simple — it’s likely to be a variation on the same theme of ‘the world has got more complicated and you need to take steps to reconcile that complexity with your capacity to manage it’ that has been the message of management science since Alfred D. Chandler.

But because the solutions are often simple, the work is surprisingly unpleasant. An effective consultant is likely to spend most of their time telling people obvious things that they don’t want to hear. That’s a difficult combination; while not particularly intellectually stimulating, it’s emotionally taxing. It’s not surprising that so many people find doing this intolerable, and consequently let their ethics slip. Telling your client what they want to hear is a better way to get repeat business; the problem won’t go away and the person commissioning the work will still like you.

There’s one sense in which the recording engineers’ maxim is more applicable, though. These are problems of human organisation, and the overwhelming majority of environmental variety of created by humans. The knowledge that something is an organisational problem means that the source of its complexity is the human beings in the organisation. That, in turn, means that the human beings in the organisation have sufficient variety and capability to match the complexity of the problem; the problem can’t be bigger than them, because their own misdirected efforts created it. Only problems that aren’t cybernetic can genuinely be insoluble.*

*One implication of this proposition is that it gives us a rigorous deduction of what would constitute environmental Armageddon — it’s the singularity point at which the problem of climate change ceases to be soluble purely by changing human behaviour and organisation.