Transcomputability, (Glanville’s corollary of) Ashby’s law of requisite variety and epistemic processes

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...

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...

Law of requisite variety: a case of IT and business alignment

This paper provides an explanation of the increasing complexity of corporate IT management as a special case of application of the law of requisite variety. Frequently cited drawback of established frameworks of IT best practices like COBIT and ITIL is their complexity and related difficulty in their implementation. Through the perspective of the law of requisite variety, drawn from the field o...

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

The Law of Requisite Hierarchy

If A is a variable of any kind, the entropy H(A) is a measure of its vanety. It shows how much the various appearances of A differ from each other, whatever be the kind and nature of these appearances. For a quantifiable variable, entropy is just another measure of variance. But entropy can be used, as a measure of variety, for qualitative variables as well. If A and B are two variables, the de...