VARIETY
What an organisation has in store when it matters — and what it cuts away itself.
This page and the page complexity are twins. Ashby's law has two sides: what comes at you, and what you have in store to respond with. Complexity is about what comes at you. This page is about the responses you have in store.
Every organisation performs a continuous, and not seldom unconscious, dance around one fundamental problem: does our capacity to respond (variety) match the challenges around us? What follows is a sketch of the framework for thinking and working that I bring along when you want more sight of, and more grip on, your own variety: the capacity to respond that you can actually realise.
CONTENTS
IMAGINE YOU ARE...
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Conceptual framework
ONE — THE VOCABULARY
TWO — THE LAW AND THE MAN
THREE — FROM BRAIN TO SOCIETY
FOUR — WHAT CARRIES THE LAW
FIVE — PROTECT AND MAKE
SIX — VARIETY AND FREEDOM
SEVEN — THE ANT AND THE GOPHER
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Operational framework
EIGHT — WHAT I OFFER
NINE — HOW A COLLABORATION BEGINS
TEN — IN PRACTICE
Imagine you are...
Imagine you are a house. Outside, it can be cold, mild, or hot. Let us say, for the moment, that "the weather" consists of three possibilities. As a house, you have a thermostat to deal with that. It can switch the heating on and off—those are two options.
When it’s sweltering hot, simply turning off the heating is no longer enough. A thermostat lacks the capacity to handle the full range of external conditions. To effectively respond to the environment outside, a home needs an air conditioning system with a "cooling" function.
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Imagine you are a company that sells a wide variety of technical devices for everyday use in and around the home. You will inevitably face vast array of different questions from (potential) buyers. The company operates a call center that is restricted to using only standard scripts. Every week, customers raise questions that cannot be answered by any of these scripts. The script-based system hits a dead end—and so do the customers. You need to grant your staff the autonomy and the budget to ensure that their response capabilities are on par with the options available elsewhere.
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Imagine you are a manager, and your repertoire of leadership styles is limited to just one: strict and directive. This means that, no matter what comes your way, you have only one way of responding. While this might work well for employees who require clear, direct guidance, it becomes problematic when you are faced with experienced professionals seeking the autonomy to innovate within the company or its products. At the same time, you may have less confident employees who need coaching, as well as individuals whose behavior you struggle to decipher—people who do things you only partially understand. In each of these scenarios, your single leadership style proves entirely ineffective. What would it be like if, in addition to being strict, you also learned to be open, curious, coaching, supportive, and capable of letting go?
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All three of the examples above relate to the most frequently violated law I know: the law of requisite variety.
This law poses the most pertinent question you can ask of any living system—whether it be yourself, your family, your organization, your neighborhood, or society at large: does the range of responses at your disposal match the scale and complexity of the challenges you face? Implicit in this is a further question: are you capable of responding to scenarios you have not yet encountered, but which might one day arise?
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It is this same law that explains why a well-intentioned policy plan can often prove counterproductive when applied to a complex issue. It explains why an organization geared toward a single type of response is thrown off balance by any unexpected shock. It explains why statements like "we have mapped out the problem," "we have a protocol in place," or "we have enacted legislation" almost never equate to "we are equipped to handle this." It explains why the Netherlands—with its highly protocol-driven healthcare system—was nonetheless ill-prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic. And it explains why Europe, having focused on peace for over 70 years, found itself ill-prepared for a neighbor that constantly stirs up conflict and launches full-scale military invasions against other nations.
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My work is always rooted in this principle. With every assignment, my first question is not "What is the problem?" but rather: "Is what we are bringing to the table—in terms of knowledge, organizational structures, conceptual frameworks, talent, motivation, flexibility, and capacity for learning—sufficiently rich to address what is actually unfolding?" Almost invariably, the answer is no. And almost invariably, that is precisely where the real intervention lies. The principle applies wherever complexity is at play: in critical infrastructure, resilience, organizational change, and policymaking. It is not a method; it is a way of looking at things. But once you have seen it, you can no longer look at things any other way.
ONE — THE VOCABULARY
Eight words that get mixed up, and one of them is the capacity.
Why do we so often think we "have it covered", only to find later that things turned out completely differently from what we hoped, thought or wished? A good part of that misunderstanding lies in the considerable sloppiness of the language with which we think we can describe reality. Let us put an important part of our vocabulary under the magnifying glass.
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Difference, inequality, variation, diversity, change, complexity, emergence and variety: eight words that constantly run through each other in the way we talk about organisations and their challenges, and are not seldom (wrongly) used as synonyms. That stands in the way of a fundamental understanding of organisations and of their challenges. Each of the eight has its own sharp meaning and, more importantly, a mutual coherence, and that coherence is what you need to get to the essence of an issue.
Difference is the driest and clearest term, and the meaning on which all the others build. Two or more things are not the same: they deviate from each other on one or more points. If you can distinguish between things, structures, processes or situations, there is a difference.
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Inequality builds on difference: inequality is about the distribution of differences. Not that there is a difference, but who has what, and how much.
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Variation is a statistical term. It describes how strongly values differ from each other within a population or a measurement: genetic variation within a species, variation between annual yields, variation between repeated measurements. The same thing in several forms. Variation is descriptive; it measures what is.
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Diversity is a term from ecology. It describes how many different species occur in an ecosystem and in what proportions: who is at the table. Diversity is linked to robustness, because an ecosystem with high diversity can absorb the loss of one species since other species fulfil similar functions. The word is now widely used for human groups, with the same underlying intuition.
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Difference, inequality, variation and diversity are all four states. You can count them, and they are there or they are not.
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Change is the transition from one state to another: the "end" state differs from the "start" state. That difference may mean that inequality has increased, variation has decreased, diversity has grown. A large change often gets a different name: upheaval, rupture, landslide, renewal, transition, metamorphosis, paradigm shift. Change is what sets the states above in motion, and what makes the two words below necessary.
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Complexity is what arises when many different elements interact in non-linear ways. The more differences, inequalities, variations and diversities occur in one setting, hang together, react to one another, and change on top of that, the more complex it becomes. A complex system has not only variation but also structured connections between what varies: a pile of stones has variation and is not complex; a living cell has variation and structure and changes constantly, which makes it one of the most complex things we know. Complexity is, put differently, the variety of the outside world: how many different things can come at you at once, and how they hang together.
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Emergence is what a whole has and its parts do not. Water is wet; hydrogen and oxygen are not. A traffic jam moves backwards while every car in it wants to move forward. An organisation has a culture that no single employee has. That is no mystery and no buzzword: at every level of coherence there are laws that are not written in the level below, and that you only see when you look at that level. The physicist Philip Anderson gave it its shortest formulation in 1972: more is different. Emergence is the reason that zooming out is a method and not a luxury, and the reason that variety carries a different name at every level. It is almost always overlooked, in two directions at once: whoever only zooms in sees the parts and misses what they are together; whoever says "emergent" of everything that was not planned sees wholes where there is only chance.
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Variety, finally, is a term from cybernetics. It describes the number of distinguishable responses a system can give: not what it is, but what it can do. A light switch has variety two, on or off. A dimmer with ten settings has variety ten. An organisation with a thousand employees who all think alike has high variation in people and low variety in response. Variety is not a state but a capacity, and it exists only if the responses can actually be given. An organisation with ten departments that each know one way of responding has diversity; an organisation in which those ten ways know each other and can be deployed where they are needed has variety. The difference lies in the connection, and that is not a side issue but the definition: the brain owes its power not to the number of neurons but to the number of connections they can make.
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The difference that matters is this: difference, inequality, variation and diversity describe a state; change describes the transition between states; complexity describes what those transitions bring about in a coherent whole; emergence describes what that whole has and its parts do not; and variety describes the capacity to respond to it.
TWO — THE LAW AND THE MAN
Only variety can absorb variety.
The principle has a name. The law of requisite variety, formulated in 1956 by W. Ross Ashby in An Introduction to Cybernetics.
Only variety can absorb variety. It is mathematically watertight, unrefuted since, and in the past seventy years applied in psychology, organisational science, ecology, neuroscience, and the design of viable companies and even whole economies.
Ashby himself was a British psychiatrist. Shortly after the Second World War he worked at Barnwood House, a psychiatric clinic in Gloucester. In a laboratory behind the main building he built — together with his future son-in-law Denis Bannister, and out of discarded Royal Air Force bomb-aiming units — a machine he called the Homeostat. Four units, four magnetic needles, interconnected. He disturbed one needle. All four started to move. Together they searched for a new stable configuration. And found one.
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The device does exactly what the law describes: a system with enough internal variety to reorganise itself under disturbance. In 1949 Time Magazine called the device the closest thing to a synthetic human brain. Norbert Wiener called Ashby's work one of the great philosophical contributions of his time. The law reached paper eight years later.
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One concept that is crucial to take in: the essential variable. Ashby's starting point was physiological — he was, after all, a doctor. Every living system has a small number of quantities that must stay within narrow limits if the system is to stay alive. Your body temperature is one of them: around 37 degrees you are healthy, at 39 you are ill, far above that you die. That limit is not an agreement or a target — it is a cliff. And the sting is not in the crossing itself but in the duration: every minute outside the limits piles up damage. Cities have such quantities too: drinking water that reaches people, acute care that functions, vulnerable residents who are seen, trust that holds. In the simulation below you see one such essential variable as a moving line, with its limits as red dotted lines. The question is never whether the line will ever cross them — every storm pushes it out sooner or later. The question is how long it stays there.
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What Ashby did, you can do here yourself. The "app" below shows the responses of two different systems to the same disturbances. The upper system is set up to always follow one and the same protocol: one response, designed for an expected environmental variable — for instance what a municipal organisation does when the heat protocol it designed itself has to come into force. The lower one is a Homeostat system: it can change its own configuration, like the machine in Barnwood House. Predict, before you press: what happens to each of them when the environment changes into something the protocol was never designed for? Then press a few times — and watch not which system does better, but when the difference becomes visible. Often nothing special happens. That too is part of the lesson.
What you probably see in the app above: as long as the disturbance falls within the design range, both systems do fine — the protocol even more tightly, without any searching. This is "peacetime" (the span in which disturbances are indeed almost 100% predictable and the responses can therefore be protocolised), in which protocols build their reputation. But as soon as the environment itself changes — the changes and disturbances are no longer crystal clear, harder to understand, more complex — the two system responses diverge. With larger environmental changes, the grey line of the protocol system stays pressed against the limit, while the protocol neatly keeps doing what it was designed for. The red line of the Homeostat system shoots out too — but then starts searching. Every grey square is a rejected configuration: a visible failure. After a series of failures there is a configuration that can cope with the new environment. The protocol fails silently and permanently; the Homeostat fails noisily and temporarily. For organisations that means something uncomfortable: a system that is not allowed to show visible failures cannot, by definition, search — and therefore cannot stabilise under disturbances it was not designed for. That is what it said at the top of this page: "we have a protocol" almost never means "we can handle it".
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Stafford Beer, who translated Ashby to organisations, drew a sobering conclusion from it: no centre can match the variety of its environment. No crisis staff, no city hall, no control room. The only way out is to organise variety where the disturbance occurs, and to make sure that variety knows itself.
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In Dutch governance practice these fundamental insights have, with a few exceptions, been structurally ignored. Not — I think — out of ignorance, but because the law makes demands on the leader that are profoundly uncomfortable. It implies that reduction to simple answers, however well presented, is structurally inadequate for exactly the type of issue for which simple answers are sought.
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My work departs from there. What I offer is not an additional method on top of what already happens; it is a way of developing the variety of thinking and acting in an organisation so that it comes to match the variety of the issue the organisation faces. Not simplifying what is complex, but making the organisation rich enough to deal with the complexity.
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THREE — FROM BRAIN TO SOCIETY
At every level variety has a different name; it is always the same capacity. What misses is the connection between them.
The brain. Variety begins with what you can see, because a response you do not see, you do not have. We have been given two kinds of attention, divided over two hemispheres and shared with nearly all vertebrates: the narrow, grasping attention that zooms in on what you already know, and the broad, vigilant attention that zooms out and watches the whole. Under pressure we narrow. Whoever can zoom out sees how large their response space really is; whoever zooms back in can do something with it. (McGilchrist; Rogers & Vallortigara.) This level returns in part Six, because this is where the illusion that section is about begins.
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The person. Effective leaders do not have a better style but a broader repertoire of styles, and can switch; that is the manager from the third example at the top. In psychology it is called flexibility, in leadership research behavioural repertoire. (Hooijberg; Kashdan & Rottenberg.)
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The team. Groups and meetings that are able to put different mental models on the table, try them out and apply them, perform better than groups that may contain more expert individuals but are dominated by a mono-thinking culture. Most groups and meetings systematically discuss what everyone already knows and usually leave aside what only one person knows. Most meetings have one way of working. That is where variety disappears, without anyone noticing. (Page; Stasser & Titus.)
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The organisation. At the level of the organisation Ashby's law, as described above, plays out in full. The variety of the leader must match that of the disturbance, and is systematically reduced by the organisation itself: the call centre with the scripts. Dutch sociotechnical systems theory calls this capacity regulatory capacity ("regelvermogen"): the room to absorb a disturbance at the place where it arises. (Ashby; De Sitter.)
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The city. Jane Jacobs saw in 1961 what planning did not see: a city is not a machine you order from above but a fabric of small, mutually supporting ties, and in that fabric lies its capacity to respond. Short blocks, mixed uses, buildings of different ages, eyes on the street: those are not aesthetic preferences but the number of different responses a neighbourhood has to what happens to it. The urban resilience literature now calls it redundancy and modularity; Jacobs called it life. (Jacobs 1961; Meerow, Newell & Stults 2016.)
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Society. A society holds its variety in its institutions: not one centre that arranges everything, but many centres that know and correct each other. Elinor Ostrom called that polycentricity and showed that communities manage their common resources (water, pasture, fishing grounds) better with many small, different sets of rules than with one large one; she received the Nobel Prize for it in 2009, and policy still behaves as if only the state or the market exists. In the language of this page: a society with one layer of government, one kind of knowledge and one kind of law has the variety of a protocol. (Ostrom 1990, 2010.)
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Life. In ecology it is not the number of species that determines the resilience of an ecosystem, but the number of different ways in which species respond to the same disturbance: response diversity. Two grasslands can be equally rich in species; the grassland whose species respond differently to drought survives. That is the precise difference between diversity and variety, and it holds at every scale of life, from the genome that raises its mutation rate under stress to the biosphere that regulates its climate. (Elmqvist et al. 2003; Walker et al. 2023.)
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Two kinds of attention, behavioural repertoire, mental models, regulatory capacity, the fabric of the street, polycentricity and response diversity. Seven names for one capacity: variety. Nobody oversees them and ties them together. That is what I do.
FOUR — WHAT CARRIES THE LAW
The question of what carries variety, and Ashby's own answer.
The question is: if Ashby's law holds, what carries it in a living system? What detects that variety falls short (the detector), and what corrects that (the widener)? The law itself is a statement about numbers and an inequality: one side has less than the other. The law does not say how a system notices that it is on the wrong side of the inequality.
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Ashby answered that question himself, four years before the law, and almost nobody reads that part. In Design for a Brain (1952) he describes ultrastability. A living system has essential variables (temperature, blood sugar, oxygen) that must stay within limits. As long as that succeeds, the system does what it was doing. As soon as an essential variable crosses its limit, a second mechanism switches on: the system changes its own arrangement, in Ashby's Homeostat literally at random, until the variable is back within its limits. Two loops, then: one that regulates, and one that notices that the regulating is failing and then changes the repertoire. The carrier of the law is that second loop: a detector (the essential variable running out of its band) and a widener (the mechanism that generates new responses).
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Ashby built the mechanism; evolution already had it. A bacterium swims straight ahead and every now and then tumbles at random into a new direction; if the environment gets worse, it tumbles more often. Two proteins register the deterioration, and the response is more randomness in behaviour. Under heavy stress a cell goes one step further and raises its mutation rate; McClintock called it "the response of the genome to challenge". Variety short, so make more variation: the law, without a nervous system. That is the pattern that returns at every level, rediscovered again and again over two hundred years by people from different disciplines; in the gallery Other attentions their names are listed, tied to the same levels that were introduced under Three above: brain, person, team, organisation, city, society, life.
The carriers of variety at seven levels, plus the ground beneath
The brain. Here the detector is called feeling. Damasio: feelings are the experience of the homeostatic state, and their function is to set the organism in motion when automatic regulation does not suffice. Neuroscience has meanwhile found the switch: the locus coeruleus–noradrenaline system shifts from exploiting to exploring as soon as the yield of current behaviour drops (Aston-Jones & Cohen 2005), and the anterior cingulate cortex reports the conflict between what you expected and what is happening. Widener: attention that broadens, behaviour that starts to search. Part of what is called neurodiversity sits here too: people with ADHD traits have that switch set more sensitively and explore sooner (Barack et al. 2024). That is not a defect in the detector but a different setting of it, and in a changing world a useful one.
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The person. The detector is discomfort. The feeling that your response does not fit, before you can say why. Whoever pushes that feeling away (it comes with the job, stop complaining, carry on) switches off their own detector and keeps giving the same response in a situation that asks for a different one. Widener: allowing yourself not to know for a moment, and then zooming out. Studio Awkwardness is not called that by accident.
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The team. A team's detector is the one who hesitates. Teams systematically discuss what everyone already knows and leave aside what only one person knows (Stasser & Titus 1985); the signal that the response does not fit therefore almost always sits with one person, and the question is whether they are allowed to say it and whether anyone hears it. Widener: working methods that bring the one deviating piece of information to the surface: the pre-mortem (suppose this has failed, what caused it), the devil's advocate, rotating chairs, and the time to stay silent before deciding. Switching it off happens by itself: one way of working, one dominant voice, and haste.
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The organisation. Beer designed the detector for organisations and gave it a name: the algedonic signal, from the Greek words for pain and pleasure. A channel that bypasses the hierarchy and reaches the top directly when, somewhere in operations, an essential variable runs out of its band. In practice that detector is called complaints, incidents, the employee who says it cannot go on like this, the lawyer who keeps calling, the journalist. Widener: room to deviate, improvisation, time, and keeping the people who know a different answer. The Dutch childcare benefits scandal is the case in which the detector gave signal for years (complaints, court cases, parliamentary questions) and the wrong loop damped that signal into noise. The organisation felt nothing; it had organised its feeling away.
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The city. Detector: what Jacobs called the eyes on the street, and beyond that vacancy, prices, waiting lists, protest, the informal economy, and the congestions (grid, soil, water) with which the page Vital systems begins: each of them an essential variable running out of its band. Widener: variety at the place where it happens, in neighbourhoods, among residents, among front-line workers, instead of in one city hall.
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Society. Here the detector is institutionalised: a free press, science, the courts, elections, the right to demonstrate. Popper called the open society exactly that: a set of institutions for discovering and correcting errors without violence. Karl Deutsch wrote its cybernetics in 1963 (The Nerves of Government): governing is steering on feedback, and a government that loses its feedback goes deaf. Widener: a society that protects its variety, in people, in institutions, in landscapes, and that makes it where it is missing: the next section of this page. The attack on press, science and courts that you now see everywhere is, in this language, only one thing: switching off the detector. With as its result: narrowing, loss of variety, concentration of power.
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Life itself. At the widest scale Ashby's essential variables have literally been drawn: Rockström's nine planetary boundaries are quantities that must stay within a band if the Earth system is to remain in the state in which humans can live. The detector exists and is called the Planetary Health Check; in 2026 it reports that seven of the nine variables are out of their band. The widening mechanism exists too, and it is the same as in the bacterium: more different responses, in more places, closer to where it happens. The difference from the bacterium is that the Earth has no second loop that switches on by itself. That loop is us, and Vital systems is my attempt to build it at the scale of a city. (Richardson et al. 2023; Planetary Health Check 2026.)
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Feeling, discomfort, the one who hesitates, the algedonic signal, the eyes on the street, the free press and the planetary boundaries. Seven detectors, and all of them a form of pain: the signal that the response does not suffice, before anyone can say why. Opposite them seven wideners, and all of them a form of the same thing: more responses, closer to where it happens. That is the carrier of the law, and at every level it has the same two weak spots. The pain can be damped instead of answered; that is what Six is about. And the widener can be cut away before anyone needed it; that is what Five is about.
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FIVE — PROTECT AND MAKE
The variety that is already there, you have to protect. The variety that is not there yet, you have to make.
Variety comes from two sources, and an organisation has to master both.
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The first is protecting what is already there. Organisations seem to have an irresistible tendency to destroy their own variety. Not out of ill will, but because in the short run exploration always loses to exploitation (March, 1991). The colleague who starts things nobody asked for, the colleague who has for years been bringing up things nobody sees: both awkward in the planning, both first in line in a reorganisation. The discomfort they cause is the price of the variety they are.
An organisation that cannot bear the discomfort cannot protect its variety.
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The second is making what is not there yet. New responses arise by switching perspective and experimenting under uncertainty, and art is the best instrument for that we know: research on arts-based methods in leadership development shows that they do exactly that, also for people without an artistic background, and that participants afterwards deal better with complexity and uncertainty (Lehtimäki et al., 2026; systematic review 2024).
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Protect and make. Studio Awkwardness is the first, Artistic Thinking the second; see the framework for working.
SIX — VARIETY AND FREEDOM
Whoever suppresses variety to stay in control, suppresses freedom. That is not a metaphor; it is what Ashby's law predicts.
In 1973, in six radio lectures for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (the Massey Lectures, published in 1974 as Designing Freedom), Stafford Beer drew the consequence Ashby's law has for a society. A government, a bank, an executive agency faces an environment of unbounded variety: millions of people, each with their own situation. He says: Ashby's law leaves you two roads. Your variety must match that of the world around you, and that can be done in two ways. The first road: enlarge your own variety. More ways of looking, more ways of deciding, more responses, closer to the place where it happens. For those who run organisations that is expensive, and rather hard, and above all: it requires you to trust people (you are, after all, placing part of your steering with others). In practice this "therefore" almost never happens.
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The second road is cheaper and, for "leaders" (and certainly for the subcategory of leaders with a preoccupation with power), easier and more attractive because it feels like control: reduce the variety of the world. You squeeze the people who come to you into categories. You let a form decide what they are allowed to say. What does not fit, you call an error. And then the law holds again: your small variety fits exactly a world you first made small yourself.
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An important note: with this move the real variety of the world has of course not diminished; the leader has reduced their own interpretation of that variety. Put bluntly: the leader has fitted themselves with blinkers.
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Beer described what this does to the citizen in one sentence:
"Your variety must be attenuated, cut down
so that your case fits a more general case."
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Stafford Beer
And he said why that costs freedom:
"We lose the freedoms we have, when our variety is attenuated, because we are not asked how the attenuation should be done."
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Stafford Beer
That is the whole mechanism. Not that an organisation simplifies (it must), but that the one who is simplified has no say in it, does not see it, and cannot push back.​​
Beer drew it himself, in two sketches in lecture II. The first is the law as it is meant: the world outside has a large variety, the leader a small one, and between the two sit two instruments. An attenuator on the way from the world to the leader, because nobody can see everything. An amplifier on the way back, because the leader must, with their small variety, still reach the whole world. Both are needed, in the right measure.
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The second sketch is what he found in institutions: the attenuator and the amplifier sit in the wrong loop. The computer multiplies what comes from outside, the leader drowns in signals that are not variety but an attenuated image of it, and their own variety is barely amplified or even attenuated. "Examination of institutional systems often reveals that the attenuators and the amplifiers have been installed in the wrong loops, on the wrong side of the equation." That is the more precise diagnosis than "the second road": not that attenuation happens, but that it happens on the wrong side, and that the amplifier is missing where it belongs.
Jürgen Habermas called the same movement, a few years later, the colonisation of the lifeworld: the system world of procedures, money and law that invades the lifeworld and rewrites it in the only language the system understands. James Scott described it in Seeing Like a State as legibility: a state must simplify in order to see, and what it cannot read does not exist for it. Three disciplines, one diagnosis.​​
The Netherlands has seen it in its sharpest form. The childcare benefits scandal (the "toeslagenaffaire") was not an accident and not an incident of ill will. It was a system that had reduced its own variety to zero and then aimed it, with devastating precision, at the citizen. One rule (all or nothing), one risk model that used nationality as a signal, one response to every deviation: reclaim. Tens of thousands of families did not fit the model, and the model had no way at all of seeing that, because it was designed not to have to see it.
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The parliamentary inquiry committee called its report Unprecedented Injustice (Ongekend onrecht). In the language of this page: the variety of the disturbance was enormous, the variety of the response was one, and the difference was charged to the people least able to bear it. Beer's sentence, literally: nobody had asked them how the attenuation should be done. The courts had already recognised the pattern: in 2020 the District Court of The Hague banned the fraud detection system SyRI, because it reduced whole neighbourhoods to a risk without anyone being able to check how.
Why is there a computer in Beer's wrong loop, and why is that, fifty years later, the heart of the matter? In 1973 he meant something simple: the computer multiplies the number of reports and figures that reach the leader, without enlarging their capacity to deal with them. But there is a deeper mechanism underneath, and it makes the computer not an ordinary amplifier but a distorter: an attenuator and an amplifier in one device, and both on the wrong side.
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First it attenuates. Every data model is a classification: fields, codes, categories, thresholds. What does not fit in a field does not get in. A human being becomes a nationality, an address, a payment arrear; a neighbourhood becomes a risk score; a situation becomes a case. That is attenuation in its purest form, and the mathematics is relentless about it: information lost in encoding comes back through no operation whatsoever. You cannot reconstruct the person from a category.
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After the attenuation comes an amplification. But the computer does not amplify the world; it amplifies the attenuated image of that world. The same classification is applied to millions of people at once, in real time, the same everywhere, with the air of completeness. That is what an amplifier does with a distorted signal: it makes the distortion louder. What reaches the leader is therefore not the variety of the world but a tunnel that poses as the world, and the tunnel is so complete, so fast and so consistent that it looks more credible than reality itself.
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The second psychiatrist
The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has described, in The Master and His Emissary, what those two attentions do to the world. The left hemisphere captures the world in categories: explicit, fixed, detached from its context, usable, and with a self-confidence that does not know what it does not know. The right hemisphere sees the whole, the living, the ambiguous, and knows that every map is a map. The left re-presents, the right presents. You need both, and the order matters: first see the whole, then zoom in, then back to the whole to check whether it still holds.
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McGilchrist's thesis, and I find it plausible, is that the Western world has increasingly come to think from the left hemisphere and to distrust the right. In the programme Vital Systems we called those two attentions zooming out and zooming in; in Studio Awkwardness it became a poster with ten left-hemisphere tools and ten right-hemisphere competences, the compass with which an organisation can test which half has the last word in it.
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In the language of this page that is a variety question, and the first one. Attention determines which responses you can see, and therefore which responses you have. Whoever only looks with the narrow attention any more has not reduced their response space to half but to what fits in categories, and does not notice, because the left hemisphere does not see its own limits. That is the largest variety reduction there is, because it precedes all the others: whoever no longer sees the whole cannot even count the variety of their team, their organisation or their city. Under pressure we all narrow; whoever can zoom out sees how large their response space really is, and whoever zooms back in can do something with it. (McGilchrist 2009, 2021.)
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Here McGilchrist returns, from part Three, and now it becomes clear why he is on this page. The computer is the left hemisphere outside the body. Classifying, detaching from context, presenting with certainty, not knowing what falls outside: it is the same attention, but built, scaled, and without a right hemisphere beside it. McGilchrist himself wrote that the world as the left hemisphere sees it looks like a bureaucracy and a machine; fifty years earlier Beer had already drawn that machine in his wrong loop. A dashboard is literally a re-presentation. The danger is not that we make dashboards, that is what the left hemisphere is supposed to do; the danger is that the re-presentation is mistaken for the overview.
Left-hemisphere attention, presented as right-hemisphere overview. That is the conjuring trick of our time, and it is believed on a large scale, precisely because the image is so sharp.
That is why this is more urgent now than in 1973. The scale is unprecedented: the classification touches everyone at once. The speed is irresponsibly high: there is no longer a human in between who can hesitate. The feedback is a pure positive feedback loop: what the model predicts becomes a decision, and the decision becomes new data, so that the model confirms itself. And, recently, language, through the large language models of AI systems: systems that produce fluent, context-rich text make the tunnel invisible, because the result sounds like overview. The distortion no longer has a face, and increasingly no visible seam either.
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The people who work with it are not the culprits; the classification was commissioned by people, mostly with good intentions and under pressure to stay in control. But whoever entrusts their decisions to such a system without organising a second kind of attention beside it, people who are allowed to see what falls outside the field, has built Beer's wrong loop, on an industrial scale.
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It also holds the other way round, for the great tasks that keep piling up in one large, permanent polycrisis. The same institutions that have attenuated their variety away towards the outside turn out to have too little variety on the inside to cope with the climate crisis, the housing crisis or the nitrogen crisis: one sector, one instrument, one time horizon. And worst of all: there is not even surprise that it does not work. Institutional failure on the largest issues and devastating precision towards the individual citizen are not two problems. It is one shortage, visible on two sides: a system that does not have enough different responses in store, and that passes the shortfall on to what falls outside the model. And that is always the Earth system and the people least able to defend themselves against it.
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That is why variety stands on this page not only as a property of healthy organisations, but as a condition for freedom. Beer asked for institutions that do not restrict more or less, but that have "liberty as its output": freedom as the outcome of the design. That means decisions close to the situation, people who are allowed to deviate from the script, and systems that treat difference as information and not as error. That is not a soft wish, nor a matter of "more human scale" as a slogan. It is the first road of the law, and the only one that does not come at the expense of those for whom the system was meant.
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(Beer, Designing Freedom, Massey Lectures 1973 (CBC 1974), lecture II (the two sketches, p. 16), III and VI; Shannon 1948 and the data processing inequality: processing cannot increase information; McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 2009, on presenting and re-presenting; Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976; Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 1981; Scott, Seeing Like a State, 1998; Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on Childcare Benefits, Ongekend onrecht (Unprecedented Injustice), 2020; District Court of The Hague, SyRI, ECLI:NL:RBDHA:2020:865.)
SEVEN — THE ANT AND THE GOPHER
Twee animals, two scarce capacities
Arjan Postma tells of an ant colony that has to move and will not. One ant starts, against all the others, carrying larvae to the new nest. She is pushed back and ignored. She carries on. After a while the colony follows her. In biology that is called a keystone individual: one animal that, through its behaviour, disproportionately determines what the group does; and colonies in which the workers differ more among themselves in boldness and exploration do better in a changing environment (Modlmeier et al. 2014).
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On 18 May 1980 Mount St. Helens explodes. Six hundred square kilometres, twice Rotterdam, dead in one blow. Except the gopher, a metre underground. Three years later researchers put a few gophers on the sterile ash layer for a single day. Six years on, forty thousand plants stand in those spots; elsewhere almost nothing. He had brought old soil to the surface, with seeds and fungi in it. He did nothing special; he did what he always did. See also my keynote: Navigating clear-eyed through uncomfortable times.
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One goes where nobody goes. The other stays where he is and digs up the soil that feeds. Both scarce in organisations, both invisible until it matters, and both the first to disappear when nobody knows what they do. Variety is knowing that you have them.
EIGHT — WHAT I OFFER
In this field I work in two ways
In the hall: the keynote Navigating clear-eyed through uncomfortable times introduces variety with a gopher, a psychiatrist and a blackbird. The keynote Getting further in uncomfortable times (in development) is about how you get to work with it in your organisation.
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In the workshop: the Polycrisis Atelier brings the variety outside into view, Studio Awkwardness the variety inside that you already have and are cutting away, and the Variety Lab (in development) teaches an organisation to see, measure and enlarge its own variety.
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In the organisation: as outsider-insider when it concerns a team, a department or a whole organisation, or in coaching and peer supervision, where it concerns the repertoire of one person or one team.
NINE — HOW A COLLABORATION BEGINS
With a conversation, what else?
A conversation is always a good idea. As far as I am concerned: one hour, no preparation, no cost. Just mutual curiosity. My curiosity: do you have any idea how many different responses your organisation has in store for what happens outside (or might be about to happen), and do you really know those options?
(And if you are already thinking "I have no idea!", then there is simply a great deal to gain.)
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TEN — IN PRACTICE
What the law makes visible in my three fields of work.
In vital systems. A city is not one system but at least twenty-five. They rest on each other, they feed each other, they break each other when one of them fails. A municipality that bases its resilience policy on one or two of those systems, only the physical infrastructure or only the care chain, has a response repertoire that is structurally narrower than the reality it will face. That is not a lack of effort or good will. It is a lack of variety.
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In resilience. Resilience is not a one-dimensional capacity but an interplay of four: anticipating, recovering, learning, changing. Four capacities that do their work at four moments in time. An organisation that invests only in the first two, and that is the natural inclination of almost every crisis infrastructure, has by definition too little variety to carry the whole cycle of a shock. The gaps are in the two capacities that are invisible in normal times.
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In governance processes. Political and administrative decision-making very often organises itself around one dominant story, one time horizon, one or a few kinds of stakeholders. For routine issues that works. For complex, multiple issues it produces structurally suboptimal or downright harmful solutions, not because the decision-makers do a poor job, but because the decision-making structure itself has too little variety to carry the complexity of the issue. I have seen it up close: a city that rehearsed 72 hours without power with people from every corner of the organisation, where everyone stayed within their own role and mandate and an external agency had to deliver a top five of priorities. The variety of the answer thereby became, de facto, only smaller. The striking thing was that there was hardly any curiosity about the variety of what had caused the disturbance in the first place.
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In each of these cases the lever is not "more effort" or "better coordination". The lever is enlarging the variety on the steering side: more perspectives at the table, more time scales in view at once, more response modes at the ready, and people who know each other's answers. Sometimes that is a methodical intervention. More often it is a change of paradigm.
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