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WHITE SPACES INNOVATION IN SWEDEN2.3 Properties of complex dynamic systemsVarietyVariety, Constraint and the Law of Requisite Variety is the title of a very influentialarticle by Ross Ashby published in 1968. The analysis in the paper has come be referredto as Ashby´s law. Ashby is also the author of another classic paper, namely Principlesof Self-Organizing Systems published 6 years earlier. He was a systems thinker or acybernetician. The three concepts mentioned in these two articles- variety, constraintsand self-organisation- are also central concepts in today´s complexity thinking and wealso use them in this report.Like most early cyberneticians, Ashby´s work was shaped by information theory asformulated by Shannon (1948) and Shannon & Weaver (1963). Rather than focusing oncommunication per se as Shannon & Weaver were, Ashby was more interested in howvariety could provide insight into a system´s capacity for regulation, i.e. its means forkeeping itself intact in the face of disturbances. Variety was conceived around the notionssurprise and difference. Ashby´s perspective was to study how chaos could beavoided. Later on another issue came to the fore, namely how variety might be amplifiedto avoid the kind of strict order that does not allow innovation. This has expandedinto emergence which in regard to the production of macro-level structures representsthe inverse of regulation through the amplification of micro-level diversity.The issue of balance leads us back to the question raised by Ashby‟s law of requisitevariety. How much variety is actually requisite?Does every instance of variety call for a response? We can illustrate the nature of theissue by means of a diagram that presents Ashby‟s Law in a graphic form (see figure2.1). The vertical axis of the diagram measures the variety of the stimuli to which asystem is subjected. The horizontal axis measures the variety of the responses availableto the system. Ashby‟s law locates adaptive responses on or below the diagonal in thediagram e i.e. the variety of a response at least matches the variety of the stimulus thatprovoked it. In a regime of high variety stimuli, the sheer variety of responses that appearsto be required might well lead to the disintegration of the system. At the otherextreme, a system with little or no variety in its responses eventually fossilizes or getsselected out.The challenge for any living system, then, is according to Boisot (2007) to navigatebetween the twin threats of disintegration and unresponsiveness. Living systems endowedwith cognitive capacities, however, have successfully evolved responses to representationstriggered by the stimuli rather than to the stimuli themselves, that is, theydraw on prior knowledge of the stimuli to filter out those elements of stimulus varietythat constitute „noise‟, concentrating their response on the much smaller variety of informationbearing stimuli that remain. In Figure 2.1 this more „cognitive‟ strategy isindicated by the line AB. In contrast with the horizontal line AC, it does not attempt to25