Week 46, 2019
Ashby’s Law: Variable, Requisite, and Agile
Each week I share three ideas for how to make work better. And this week, I look to cybernetics for lessons in org. design and agility.
Why am I writing about this? I came across Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (also called the 1st Law of Cybernetics or simply Ashby’s Law) while researching last week’s issue on budgeting (see w452019). And it blew my mind! Because while the law is simple enough to understand, it explains quite elegantly why everyone and their grandmother is now desperately trying to transform their organizations.
Let’s dig in.
1. Variable
Cybernetics is the study of structures, constraints, and possibilities in complex adaptive systems. And variety is the term used to describe the number of possible states that they contain or, to be more precise: variety is the term used to describe the information available to us about those states. The implication is this: in order to control a system, we must first gain complete knowledge about the variety that it contains.
EXAMPLE: A thermostat is a system with which to control the temperature. Imagine that someone asks you to design a thermostat for a specific use case in a specific location. You’d find it hard to provide the right controls unless you’re also told about the temperature range (i.e., variety) to expect.
2. Requisite
Requisite means “necessary” or “sufficient”. And that’s what Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (named after its originator W. Ross Ashby) is all about. The law states that the more variable the operating environment, the more variable a system must be or, to put it in slightly more dramatic terms: a system will fail unless its variability matches or surpass that of its environment.
EXAMPLE: A thermostat designed for Nukulaelae atoll in Tuvalu, where temperatures range from +27c to +29c, would not fair well if installed in my hometown of Stockholm, Sweden, where temperature range from -30c on a cold winter’s day to a splendid +30c in the summer.
3. Agile
Long-time readers will be familiar with the idea of organizations as complex adaptive systems (see w312019). And that, of course, means that our organizations are also subject to Ashby’s Law. In order to deal with the world around us, we need a repertoire of responses that are equal to or greater than the problems we face. The only difference is in terminology — we usually replace “variety” with “complexity” and “agility”.
EXAMPLE: An organization designed to do one thing well would benefit from efficiencies and economies of scale. But those benefits would come at the price of decreased flexibility. It would be less agile. And it would be less well prepared to deal with changes in customer demand etc.
What passes for requisite variety today is not the same as what passed for requisite variety a 100 odd years ago. The world has changed. And we now have televisions, commercial air travel, cell phones, computers, and the Internet etcetera. And yet many of the business processes we use today are holdovers from the early 1900s.
Just think about how we do budgeting (virtually indistinguishable from the process outlined in James McKinsey’s 1922 textbook on the subject) or how we structure organizations (author Aaron Dignan makes the point here that it’s very difficult to distinguish a contemporary org chart from one created 100 years ago).
We’ve let our organization fall out of sync with our environment. And with that, we’re at serious risk of violating the Ashby’s Law.
That’s all for this week.
Until next time, stay calm.
