As we move away from functional based work to team based process management, we expect people to take ownership of the processes that they are charged with managing, continuously improve the process, communicate with customers and suppliers - in short we expect them to use their brains and manage their own personal 'black boxes'. Where empowerment is practised process workers will manage the 'black box'. Here the intent is to have efficiencies at the level of the function rather than process. It is now recognised that customers will benefit most from a process view of the organization which involves multifunctional collaboration - multidisciplinary teamworking. Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety Variety is a measure of the number of possible states of the system.
Variety is thus a measure of the complexity of the system.
However, in order to 'control' a system, the regulator of the system needs to absorb the variety of the system. This is in keeping with the Law of Requisite Variety which states that 'only variety can destroy variety'. An organization exists in its market place. As we may expect, the variety of the marketplace is significantly greater than the organization, which in turn has significantly greater variety than its management. But we all know that most organizations manage to survive in the marketplace and that managers to varying degrees are successful in steering their organizations.