Stafford Beer takes an approach to this problem that helps to mark the distinction between information theory and cybernetics. That solution is to say that information and action are one and the same; variety coming in from the environment, or being transferred from one system to another, only counts as ‘information’ if it has a causal role in decision-making. Otherwise it’s just ‘data’ — collections of facts that hang around on disk drives, waiting to be erased* or for the format to become obsolete.

*There are a lot of people is Silicon Valley who might do well to consider how much money they have invested in ‘data’ without bearing this distinction in mind.

Of course management theories change — when the foundations of the problem are constantly shifting, the answers are bound to change.

If you translate this problem into the more abstract language of cybernetics, it becomes easier to understand. In the business environment, complexity (environmental variety) will naturally increase. In any given organisational structure, the variety which management systems can bring to bear also increases, but more slowly.*

*If it was possible to measure variety in absolute terms for real-world.

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.

This is the paradigm shift that might be required — that organisations and systems can be like people, having purposes without a single goal. An artist doesn’t have a successful career by maximising their art; they do it by repeatedly producing work that they are proud of.

That’s what the world could look like if we got rid of the blind spots. Business ought to be like artists, not paperclip maximisers. The economic concept of optimisation, and the institutions of management and government which enforce its use, effectively act as a brutal information reducing filter. By taking away the pressure to maximise a single metric (and therefore to throw away information that doesn’t relate to it), organisations could apply their decision-making capabilities much more effectively. They could innovate more, design more sustainable solutions and build less adversarial, longer-term relationships with their people.

If every maximising system has to have a higher-level system governing it (to make sure it doesn’t go bonkers), then that logically implies that the top level of any decision-making system that’s meant to operate autonomously can’t be a maximiser. And so, the governing philosophy of the overall economic system can’t be based on the constrained optimisation methodology that’s currently dominant in the subject of economics. Otherwise there’s a risk that the system will go bonkers, and that it will start pushing maximising objectives, oblivious to the danger that it’s on course for making human life impossible. Like it actually has done.