Gene Bellinger states this "universal truth" in his Systems Thinking musings at Organizational Change - Yet Another Thought.
He goes on to outline an adaptation based on "Cybernetics: A New Management Tool" by Barry Clemson (1984), Abacus Press:
Laws of Organizations
- Organizations organize themselves; the characteristic structural and behavioral patterns in an organization are primarily a result of the interactions among the parts of the organization.
- Organizations have basins of stability separated by thresholds of instability.
- The output of an organization is dominated by the feedback and within wide variations the input is irrelevant. All outputs that are important to the organization will have associated feedback loops.
- Given an organization and some regulator of that organization, the amount of regulation attainable is absolutely limited by the variety of the regulator.
Most of the regulation of organizations is achieved though the interaction of the parts (i.e. one part acts to regulate some other part).
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