Infrastructure autopoiesis: requisite variety to engage complexity

Requisite variety, autopoiesis, and self-organization

Ashby’s law of requisite variety states that a controller must have at least as much variety (complexity) as the controlled. Maturana and Varela proposed autopoiesis (self-production) to define living systems. Living systems also require to fulfill the law of requisite variety. A measure of autopoiesis has been proposed as the ratio between the complexity of a system and the complexity of its e...

Governance and Metagovernance: On Reflexivity, Requisite Variety, and Requisite Irony

There has been growing interest in the past twenty years or so in the potential contribution of new forms of governance to solving coordination problems in and across a wide range of specialized social systems (such as the economy, the legal system, the political system, and the health system) and in the lifeworld (or, broadly understood, civil society). This interest is reflected in growing am...

Action Variety of Planners: Cognitive Load and Requisite Variety

The complexity of planning tasks have increased over the past decade. There is relatively poor understanding what the implications are of increased task complexity in planning and scheduling operations. Previous work in the behavorial sciences have investigated the concept of cognitive load, addressing both task complecity and task workload or stress, and have concluded that decision makers ten...

Complexity and Organization–Environment Relations: Revisiting Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety

Requisite Variety and Firm Performance: an Empirical Exploration

The organizational demography, sensemaking, and high reliability literatures often assert that requisite variety enables organizations to notice more, develop a broader repertoire of responses, and be more adaptive over time. While this assertion remains intuitively appealing it has received little focused empirical attention. The empirical tests that have claimed to test requisite variety have...