Rules For The Viable System
In "Heart of Enterprise" a companion volume to "Brain...", Beer applies Ashby's concept of (Requisite) Variety: the number of possible states of a system or of an element of the system. There are two aphorisms that permit observers to calculate Variety; four Principles of Organization; the Recursive System Theorem; three Axioms of Management and a Law of Cohesion. These rules ensure the Requisite Variety condition is satisfied, in effect that resources are matched to requirement.
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