Organizational Myopia: Purple Loosestrife and the Law of Requisite Variety

January
26
2009

If you travel along Highway 7 between Toronto and Ottawa, you’ll find it bordered in places by vast marshy areas that have been taken over by purple loosestrife, a plant that a website devoted to it refers to as the “Beautiful Killer”. It is such a prolifically invasive plant that it displaces virtually all other plants native to the areas it decides to colonize. This, in turn, has dire consequences for any animal life that relies on healthy wetland habitat for its survival. When I first encountered this purple profusion I was doing some consulting work in Ottawa with Alan Emery who was, at the time, president of the Canadian Museum of Nature. We got to talking about the imperialistic ambitions of purple loosestrife at dinner one night and, more generally, about the vulnerability of ecological systems that are dominated by a single plant species. Imagine, if you will, a creature with a sweet tooth and insatiable appetite for purple loosestrife getting access to these marshlands and devouring the only living thing in it. The result would be a barren marshland with no living thing in it. On the other hand, systems that are characterized by a diversity of plant species are robust because they can survive the demise of any single species within them. As Alan and I talked, it occurred to me that something similar to what happens in ecological systems can also happen with social systems. I have seen powerful internal stakeholders representing a dominant profession or significant organizational function become the purple loosestrife of their environments. In such situations, the concerns, perceptions and interests of dominant organizational players come to define the agenda of the enterprise.

It was in the course of this conversation and these musings that Alan introduced me to the Law of Requisite Variety, a principle developed by Ross Ashby from his work in cybernetics. Here’s how it goes: “The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate”, or “Only variety can destroy variety.” Put another way, only variety can withstand variety.

“This principle has important implications for practical situations: since the variety of perturbations a system can potentially be confronted with is unlimited, we should always try to maximize its internal variety (or diversity), so as to be optimally prepared for any foreseeable or unforeseeable contingency.”

F. Heylighen & C. Joslyn, Principia Cybernetica

We treat the world the way we construe it. Most professions put people through an intense process of socialization and indoctrination from which they emerge with a particular and peculiar way of construing the world. So if we have an organization that is dominated by a particular profession or function analogous to the marshland’s purple loosestrife, we’ll find that the organization will construe the environment through the highly developed but myopic lens of that profession. And to the extent that we treat the world the way we construe it, that organization will likely develop strategies and plans that are consistent with its seriously limited misreading of the environment within which it functions. This, of course, makes the organization extremely vulnerable because it will see neither the threats nor, for that matter, the opportunities that may present themselves to it.

In contrast to this, the improvising jazz ensemble is purposefully diverse and works to ensure that it enhances the variety of actions available to it. When all members of the ensemble are attending to its shared project and its “environment” – its audience - its culture of shared leadership increases the likelihood that what is perceived by one will be available to all. This is not a command-and-control system but rather a self-organizing system where power is distributed among the musicians and moves back and forth between whoever happens to be soloing at the moment and those who, at the moment, are accompanying them. The assumption here is that what is important is the idea in the middle of the table; the shared project of the improvised musical conversation.

While it’s entirely possible that any given organization will have a variety of actions available to it, what is less certain is whether it will avail itself of them. By this I mean that there are very likely people who are not members of the dominant profession or significant function who see the environment through their own special lenses, but are never given an opportunity to speak. Such an organization will have an insufficient variety of actions available to it and will not be able to compensate for the larger variety of disturbances in the outside world.

Are there any “Beautiful Killers” in your organization?