Abstract
Problematic situations are recurrent in organisational systems. We are all, individually or collectively, managing them and need strategies for this purpose. Indeed, for as long as we maintain interactions with others we are managing problematic situations; sometimes we simplify them too much yet in others we respond chaotically without proper reflexion; in either case the cost of these responses to people and organisations can be too high. In this paper I reflect upon a third strategy aided by Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety and complexity theory. The law gives insights to manage environmental and organisational complexities and complexity theory gives insights about environmental constraints and the emergence of self-organisation. Together they provide a view of organisational systems and most significantly, of how to improve the management of extreme situations -black swans-, such as wars, catastrophes, social unrest, extremism, and multiple other expressions of very high variety situations.
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Notes
- 1.
I understand affordances as resource supported interactions between a system’s actors and environmental agents, which allow the system producing requisite responses to environmental disturbances.
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Espejo, R. (2018). In Anticipation of Black Swans. In: Barile, S., Pellicano, M., Polese, F. (eds) Social Dynamics in a Systems Perspective. New Economic Windows. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61967-5_7
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