Practically, it says that in order to deal properly with the diversity of problems the world throws at you, you need to have a repertoire of responses which is (at least) as nuanced as the problems you face.

Ross Ashby, a pioneer British cyberneticist and psychiatrist, formulated his law of requisite variety in the context of regulation in biology — how organisms are able to adapt to their environment — and then, in quick succession, to aspects of Claude Shannon’s information theorem, and systems in general. Such interdisciplinary bridges were characteristic of the cybernetic approach. Stafford Beer extended the concept to help analyse the structure and management of organisations and whole societies.

Groping back to bed after a piss I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate—
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art! O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there. The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

Today I’ve been mostly reading this….

10/10 for intention. 0/10 for execution.

“Outdated, uber-complex, ineffective, unresponsive, unreflexive, unaccountable, captive to private interests, and hollowed out by preferential lobbying. These failings have unacceptable consequences, particularly in an age in which climate change risks to push us into ‘hot’ zones of our O-space.”

<philippevandenbroeck.medium.com/ray-ison-…>

“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and how people think.” Gregory Bateson (1904 - 1980)

Even the most exciting project becomes a chore when it is smothered by the constant brain noise known as tinnitus.

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

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.