morning, Marsha and KO, These both seem correct 'laws' or rules, but at different levels.
Requisite Variety seems a statement of Social Level competence. Specialization seems to give a picture of the Intellectual Level where a depth of knowledge is needed. If you look at two dfferent types of jobs in a company, a manager and a subject-matter expert, you can see how each will apply one of the laws more intensively than the other. KO > Almost the opposite - specialisation is the winning way - Ricardo's theory > of Comparative Advantage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo shows > how we are most of service when we specialise. mel: For short-hand well name this CAS for Comparative Advantage of Specialization > MarshaV > > I like this... > > > > "In cybernetics there's a law called the Law of Requisite Variety. It > > says that in any system of human beings or machines, the element in that > > system with the widest range of variability will be the controlling element. > > And if you restrict your behavior, you lose on requisite variety." > > (Bandler and Grinder, frogs into PRINCES', 1979, P.74) > > mel: For this we'll use LRV as a short tag. The manager, ignoring the build-a-self-serving-empire type, works to support the subject matter experts by providing all they need to get their jobs done and clears obstacles from their paths. She helps obtain resources for unforseen emergencies. She coordinates people who have serial dependencies such that efficiency is maximized and she reduces loss of effort and turbulance to maximize effectiveness. These are all social level, organizational tasks. Her limit on the subject matter is simply to know enough to understand why the subject matter experts need what they do, when. (a little over simplified, but generally in the right direction.) She is valuable as a manager to the extent she can draw from the breadth of the enterprise and coordinate the maximum variety of leveraged cooperation to maintain the focus of the overall 'management unit' on achieving its goals. She is a creature of LRV in her job. (We'll say her degree was an MBA, which if you don't have one is a 'broad knowledge' degree to teach the student a huge flexible picture of the entire theoretical business enterprize.) The subject matter expert we will assume is a PhD with a depth of knowledge in the subject he studied and enough lab and applied work to have built actual competence beyond simple theoretical knowledge. He was hired to help halve the size of a 'piece of technology' by applying his competence and depth of specialized knowledge. He works as part of a team to achieve this goal. (specialization that got him a degree in the first place) He spends his days alternating between the arcana of building to design, by hypothesis, testing the result using those pesky things called numbers. And starting a new cycle of change on the design vestors of their project. Occasionally he has meetings and reports that interrupt his INTELLECTUAL work for SOCIAL. So, he is a creature of CAS. Both the manager and the subject matter expert exist as humans subject to the same levels of evolutons as the rest of us, but each specialises in skills that are more LRV or more CAS centric. Okay, way more ANALysis thatn most folks need but my inner geek slipped out to play. Many bits of over-generalization were used here and only a few animals were killed in the effort. thanks--mel Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
