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Ashby, Fuzzy, and Me

This talk extends the concept of variety engineering beyond the conventional interpretation of Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. It first establishes that the Law is more accurately understood as an axiomatic theorem than an empirical law, and examines the assumptions on which it rests. Using simple causal matrices and scaling mathematics, it shows that matching regulatory variety to environmental variety is necessary but insufficient for effective regulation: the absolute scale of the regulatory challenge also matters, because the number of possible regulatory selections can grow exponentially or factorially.

A broader variety engineering framework supplements the familiar strategies of attenuating environmental variety and amplifying regulatory variety. It incorporates modularisation, the management of interdependence, cadence and latency, the specification and hierarchical organisation of goals, and the use of regulatory models to reduce search — showing why small changes in goal variety can substantially reduce regulatory demands, why “good enough” local models may be more economical than perfect ones, and why metasystemic hierarchies are needed to coordinate modules and absorb residual variety.

Steve argues that an information-theoretic account alone cannot fully explain organisational structure or viability. A more comprehensive approach must incorporate the acquisition, allocation and expenditure of energy — in social organisations, money — and the resulting economies and diseconomies of scale.

About the speaker. Steve Morlidge has 30 years of practical experience in designing and running performance management systems in Unilever, including three years as the lead of a global change project. He is a former chairman of the European Beyond Budgeting Round Table and now works as a management thinker, writer and speaker, drawing on his years of experience at the leading edge of performance management thought and practice.