Variety can destroy Variety

Variety is commonly a descriptor of the volume of potential states within a system.

The variety grows exponentially with the magnitude of organizations and major systems, creating massive extents of complexity with regard to its interactions.

Variety is a measure of complexity.

Ashby’s Law:

W. Ross Ashby was a British cyberneticist and psychologist who, during the 1960s, proposed law with regard to levels of variety and regulation within biological systems. In his words:

When the variety or complexity of the environment exceeds the capacity of a system (natural or artificial) the environment will dominate and ultimately destroy that system.

In order to handle accordingly with the diversity of problems the world throws at you, you require to have a repertoire of responses that are (at least) as nuanced as the problems you face.

Requisite Variety: Requisite means basic or recommended. So requisite variety suggests that you require a specific amount of information for some purpose.

Law of requisite variety: If a system is to be stable, the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled.

For organizations and teams, Ashby’s law effectively means that they must invariably remain more flexible with their approaches to strategy and operation than the levels of structure and complexity within their systems and operating environment. Sometimes this variety is modest, but occasionally it can be enormous, and thus it is up to the organizations, teams, and the leaders within them to gauge the suitability of their present systems for the environment they operate in.

If the systems which regulate don’t have enough (or requisite) variety to contest the complexity of the regulated, then regulation will fail. The system will be out of control.

All these reasons help us to deal with a complex system.

As a leader, we require to figure out the prevailing complexity of the system and assure a variety of mechanism to handle with the complexity.

Organizations have two choices suitable in shaping for requisite variety - Amplification and Attenuation.

Source: Global Risk Insights

Amplification: Amplification is where the team sets up collaboration with diverse agents in its external environment to strengthen its expertise to respond to stimuli. To amplify variety, we need to empower subordinates, hire more experienced employee, Train existing employees, and Collaborate with external agents etc

Attenuation: Reduction of the variety of possible disturbances given to the essential variables.To attenuate variety, we can Standardize communication and Standardize processes etc.

I am sure most of us are engaged in some of the other ways of dealing with such complexity. As a Leader of a complex system, we must know this and apply this for our own development. Sometimes team members will ask why scaling agile has so many events in the system? this will explain to address complex system, we need to have many meaningful events and leaders should facilitate such events for better results.