Requisite variety refers to the capacity required to overcome disturbances the system is “likely” to encounter. When an automated system is overwhelmed, human operators must come to its aid. We might say that the automated system lacked variety, and the humans increased the variety of the combined system. Deciding how much variety to include is a design decision. Are we designing for a hundred-year flood or a magnitude-8 earthquake? We weigh the likelihood of the disturbance against the cost of including the variety required to resist it.

<www.dubberly.com/articles/…>

Russell Ackoff put it well, “Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes.” Horst Rittel called them “wicked problems.”

No matter what we call them, most of the challenges that really matter involve systems, for example, energy and global warming; water, food, and population; and health and social justice. And in the day- to-day world of business, new products that create high value almost all involve systems, too, for example, Alibaba and Amazon; Facebook and Google; and Apple and Samsung.

<www.dubberly.com/articles/…>

“Cybernetics is the science of feedback, information that travels from a system through its environment and back to the system. A feedback system is said to have a goal, such as maintaining the level of a variable (e.g., water volume, temperature, direction, speed, or blood glucose concentration). Feedback reports the difference between the current state and the goal, and the system acts to correct differences. This process helps ensure stability when disturbances threaten dynamic systems, such as machines, software, organisms, and organizations.”

“Simple feedback systems have goals imposed on them. Second-order systems, which observe themselves, may adjust their goals. Second-order systems don’t just react; they may also learn. When two first-order systems engage, the result is interaction. They push each other. When two second-order systems engage, the result may be conversation, an exchange about both goals and means. As discourse on cybernetics expands to second-order systems, issues of ethics emerge.”

www.dubberly.com/articles/…

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had. And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn. By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern. And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

“Citizens Advice is a place where smart thinking, leading to smart doing, has been going on for quite a while now. This post records the inflection point they have reached, recognising that the entanglement of digital and online risks getting in the way of what actually matters, which is delivering the services people need, in the way they are best able to receive them.” <wearecitizensadvice.org.uk/to-take-t…>

What is conversation? How can we design for effective conversation?

“We talk all the time, but we’re usually not aware of when conversation works, when it doesn’t, and how to improve it. Few of us have robust models of conversation. This article addresses the questions: What is conversation? How can conversation be improved? And, if conversation is important, why don’t we consider conversation explicitly when we design for interaction?”

Cybernetics and Design: Conversations for Action by Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro

Slowly the women file to where he stands
Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair, Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly
Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,
Within whose warm spring rain of loving care
Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child, What’s wrong, the deep American voice demands,
And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer
Directing God about this eye, that knee.
Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some
Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud
With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone, that hands have come
To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd
Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice—

What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,
As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps, Spreads slowly through them—that, and the voice above
Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.

I have great passion for the early poetry of Philip Arthur Larkin, the English writer, jazz critic and librarian.

You can’t go around calling yourself Mr #Diversity and #inclusion then not tolerate others’ with an opinion different from your own who make a valid argument.

The highest form of diversity is a diversity of perspectives. Now, how we reach that highest form of diversity is up for debate, I guess.  I like to think that we can get there by hiring fully qualified people who come from diverse cognitive, emotional and development backgrounds. By focusing on gender you’re missing the point and seem to be diversity washing while the problem remains the same - the veneer of improvement without the substance.

Lovely winter fruit.

First vaccine shot booked! First available appointment is three weeks away 😟

“Consequences of system blindness and possibilities of system sight” by @barryoshry and hosted by SCiO
youtu.be/ddI-8zPG0…

I’ve followed the work of @kouroshdini for years and for me his work on productivity and the GTD® method is par excellence.

HBR (sponsored by PWC) has a useful survey on #cyber #risk #quantification

I had the great fortune to experience @BarryOshry in person in July 2015. He’s done much to share his passion for turning system blindness to system sight. Currently reading: Context, Context, Context: How Our Blindness to Context Cripples Even the Smartest Organizations by Barry Oshry 📚

How is it possible that the Australian vaccine authorities did not foresee the need for a scalable, online vaccine appointment booking system? 🤦‍♀️

I’ve reread The Fractal Organisation several times and always seem to find something new to appreciate everytime. #VSM #StaffordBeer

Finished reading: The Fractal Organization: Creating sustainable organizations with the Viable System Model by Patrick Hoverstadt & Lucy Loh 📚

The recent whitepaper from ISACA on #cyber #risk quantification is a useful read.