Viability, Sustainability and Non-Requisite Variety

Leonardo Lavanderos, Abelardo Araya, Alejandro Malpartida

In his work, Ashby demonstrated the importance of a certain quantitative relationship called the law of requisite variety. After finding this relationship, Ashby related it to Shannon's theorem on the amount of noise or error that could be eliminated through a correction channel. The native limitation in the law of requisite variety, like the Shannon equation, applied in thermodynamics, is that the relational nature of the organization is not considered. Thus, he formulated that only the variety can absorb variety. However, the previous statement is only valid when it is formulated in the domain of interactions, but it is not possible to sustain it when dealing with relationships; as is the case of human organizations. This work introduces the concept of non-requisite variety (NRV) of Viability defined within the model of Relational. Therefore, a methodology is introduced to "measure" the degree of waste that occurs within a network which deviates from its organizational identity due to poor communication. The history of Science allows us to see that we are talking about the "history" of the reduction of non-requisite variety because, in the process of generating value, this phenomenon not only produces value equal to 0 but also generates values less than 0. Consequently, non-requisite variety destroys variety.

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